| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: the power to dip into the treasury of Aboul Casem. But we saw a
splendid lobster and a crab fastened to a string which the fisherman
was dangling in his right hand, while with the left he held his tackle
and his net.
We accosted him with the intention of buying his haul,--an idea which
came to us both, and was expressed in a smile, to which I responded by
a slight pressure of the arm I held and drew toward my heart. It was
one of those nothings of which memory makes poems when we sit by the
fire and recall the hour when that nothing moved us, and the place
where it did so,--a mirage the effects of which have never been noted
down, though it appears on the objects that surround us in moments
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: up; the detested Brandeis, at great risk, threw himself between the
lines and expostulated with the Mataafas - his only personal
appearance in the wars, if this could be called war. The same
afternoon, the Tamasese boats got in with provisions, having passed
to seaward of the lumbering Manono fleet; and from that day on,
whether from a high degree of enterprise on the one side or a great
lack of capacity on the other, supplies were maintained from the
sea with regularity. Thus the spectacle of battle, or at least of
riot, at the doors of the German firm was not repeated. But the
memory must have hung heavy on the hearts, not of the Germans only,
but of all Apia. The Samoans are a gentle race, gentler than any
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: set there gazing with all his eyes at something else,
I couldn't tell what. And so the old man raged right along,
pouring his words out like a stream of fire:
"I killed him! I am guilty! But I never had the notion
in my life to hurt him or harm him, spite of all them lies
about my threatening him, till the very minute I raised
the club--then my heart went cold!--then the pity all went
out of it, and I struck to kill! In that one moment all my
wrongs come into my mind; all the insults that that man
and the scoundrel his brother, there, had put upon me,
and how they laid in together to ruin me with the people,
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner: compensates her for the organic sufferings of womanhood--in the conviction
that, by so doing, she makes more possible a fuller and higher attainment
of motherhood and wifehood to the women who will follow her. It is this
consciousness which makes of solemn importance the knock of the humblest
woman at the closed door which shuts off a new field of labour, physical or
mental: is she convinced that, not for herself, but in the service of the
whole race, she knocks.
It is this abiding consciousness of an end to be attained, reaching beyond
her personal life and individual interests, which constitutes the religious
element of the Woman's Movement of our day, and binds with the common bond
of an impersonal enthusiasm into one solid body the women of whatsoever
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