Today's Stichomancy for Shigeru Miyamoto

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Extracts From Adam's Diary by Mark Twain:

to get her a kangaroo if she would let this one go, but it did no good--she is determined to run us into all sorts of foolish risks, I think. She was not like this before she lost her mind.

A Fortnight Later

I examined its mouth. There is no danger yet; it has only one tooth. It has no tail yet. It makes more noise now than it ever did before--and mainly at night. I have moved out. But I shall go over, mornings, to breakfast, and to see if it has more teeth. If it gets a mouthful of teeth, it will be time for it to go, tail or no tail, for a bear does not need a tail in order to be dangerous.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine:

It was dark by the time he reached the cabin. He dismounted, and with his arms full of provisions pushed into the hut.

"Awake, Bann?" he asked in a low voice.

The answer was unexpected. Something heavy struck his chest and flung him back against the wall. Before he could recover his balance he was pinioned fast. Four men had hurled themselves upon him.

"We've got you, Jim. Not a mite o' use resisting," counseled the sheriff.

"Think I don't savez that? I can take a hint when a whole Methodist church falls on me. Who are y'u, anyhow?"

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Heroes and eagles, hills and skies. Ye who contemn the fatted slave Look on this emblem, and be brave.

Poem: IV

See in the print how, moved by whim, Trumpeting Jumbo, great and grim, Adjusts his trunk, like a cravat, To noose that individual's hat. The sacred Ibis in the distance Joys to observe his bold resistance.

Poem: V

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 Russia in 1919 by Arthur Ransome:

and presently had to admit that soon there would be no electricity for lack of fuel. They did not sufficiently base their policy on the study of actual possibilities. "But that they are really fighting against a bourgeois dictatorship is clear to us. We are, therefore, prepared to help them in every possible way."

He said, further: "Intervention of any kind will prolong the regime of the Bolsheviks by compelling us to drop opposition to the Soviet Government, although we do not like it, and to support it because it is defending the revolution."