Today's Stichomancy for Sarah Michelle Gellar

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young:

``Bessie Bell doesn't know what she is talking about. Of course you are sisters. Everybody knows you are sisters!''

Bessie Bell was distressed to be told that she did not know what she was talking about--and she knew so much about Sisters.

So she began to cry, very softly.

Then she stopped crying long enough to say: ``But I never saw Sisters like that before!''

Then she took up her crying again right where she left off.

Then a little boy--but he seemed a very large boy to Bessie Bell with his long-striped-stocking-legs--said to Bessie Bell: ``No, Bessie Bell, they are not Sisters like Sister Helen Vincula and the

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift:

all vessels whatsoever. I communicated to his majesty a project I had formed of seizing the enemy's whole fleet; which, as our scouts assured us, lay at anchor in the harbour, ready to sail with the first fair wind. I consulted the most experienced seamen upon the depth of the channel, which they had often plumbed; who told me, that in the middle, at high-water, it was seventy GLUMGLUFFS deep, which is about six feet of European measure; and the rest of it fifty GLUMGLUFFS at most. I walked towards the north-east coast, over against Blefuscu, where, lying down behind a hillock, I took out my small perspective glass, and viewed the enemy's fleet at anchor, consisting of about fifty men

Gulliver's Travels

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Peter Pan by James M. Barrie:

At first Mrs. Darling did not know, but after thinking back into her childhood she just remembered a Peter Pan who was said to live with the fairies. There were odd stories about him, as that when children died he went part of the way with them, so that they should not be frightened. She had believed in him at the time, but now that she was married and full of sense she quite doubted whether there was any such person.

"Besides," she said to Wendy, "he would be grown up by this time."

"Oh no, he isn't grown up," Wendy assured her confidently, "and he is just my size." She meant that he was her size in both mind

Peter Pan

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 Plutarch's Lives by A. H. Clough:

One that on his feet Would with the Lydian cars compete.

He simply shows himself all along a half-lettered, childish writer; in the words of Diphilus,

-- of wit obese, O'erlarded with Sicilian grease.

Often he sinks to the very level of Xenarchus, telling us that he thinks it ominous to the Athenians that their general, who had victory in his name, was unwilling to take command in the expedition; and that the defacing of the Hermae was a divine intimation that they should suffer much in the war by