| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: attempts at that transmutation of metals, which I think your own
great chemist, Sir Humphry Davy, allowed might be possible, but
held not to be worth the cost of the process--possibly, in those
attempts, some scanty grains of this substance were found by the
alchemists, in the crucible, with grains of the metal as niggardly
yielded by pitiful mimicry of Nature's stupendous laboratory; and
from such grains enough of the essence might, perhaps, have been
drawn forth, to add a few years of existence to some feeble
graybeard--granting, what rests on no proofs, that some of the
alchemists reached an age rarely given to man. But it is not in
the miserly crucible, it is in the matrix of Nature herself, that
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Twilight Land by Howard Pyle: "that I might get out of this scrape." That is what we have all
wished many and many a time in a like case; but just now it did
the soldier no more good to wish than it does good for the rest
of us. "Bah!" said he, "it is nothing but a black stone after
all." And then he threw it into the fire.
Puff! Bang! Away flew the embers upon every side, and back
tumbled the soldier, and there in the middle of the flame stood
just such a grim, black being as he had one time shot at with the
silver button.
As for the poor soldier, he just lay flat on his back and stared
with eyes like saucers, for he thought that his end had come for
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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 The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs: retort.
"You forget yourself, Prince von der Tann," he cried.
"Leave our presence. When we again desire to be insulted
we shall send for you."
As the chancellor passed into the antechamber Count
Zellerndorf rose and greeted him warmly, almost effusively.
Von der Tann returned his salutations with courtesy but
with no answering warmth. Then he passed on out of the
palace.
"The old fox must have heard," he mused as he mounted
his horse and turned his face toward Tann and the Old
The Mad King |
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 Study of a Woman by Honore de Balzac: their opinion of her until the moment when Monsieur de Listomere
becomes a peer of France, when she herself will be thirty-six years of
age,--a period of life when most women discover that they are the
dupes of social laws.
The marquis is a rather insignificant man. He stands well at court;
his good qualities are as negative as his defects; the former can no
more make him a reputation for virtue than the latter can give him the
sort of glamor cast by vice. As deputy, he never speaks, but he votes
RIGHT. He behaves in his own home as he does in the Chamber.
Consequently, he is held to be one of the best husbands in France.
Though not susceptible of lively interest, he never scolds, unless, to
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