Today's Stichomancy for Sidney Poitier

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Wyoming by William MacLeod Raine:

day-dreams how it actually was to occur.

Nora had been eager to see something of the round-up, and as she was no horsewoman her mistress took her out one day in her motor. The drive had been that day on Bronco Mesa, and had finished in the natural corral made by Bear Canon, fenced with a cordon of riders at the end opening to the plains below. After watching for two hours the busy scenes of cutting out, roping and branding, Helen wheeled her car and started down the canyon on their return.

Now, a herd of wild cattle is uncertain as an April day's behavior. Under the influence of the tame valley cattle among

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Dreams by Olive Schreiner:

touched them, but his fingers clung more tenderly.

So they wandered on, through the dark lands and the light, always with that little brave smiling one between them. Sometimes they remembered that first radiant Joy, and whispered to themselves, "Oh! could we but find him also!"

At last they came to where Reflection sits; that strange old woman who has always one elbow on her knee, and her chin in her hand, and who steals light out of the past to shed it on the future.

And Life and Love cried out, "O wise one! tell us: when first we met, a lovely radiant thing belonged to us--gladness without a tear, sunshine without a shade. Oh! how did we sin that we lost it? Where shall we go

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells:

aviation camp, now a park of waiting field guns, now an encampment of cavalry. One turns aside, and abruptly one is in France--France as one knew it before the war, on a shady secondary road, past a delightful chateau behind its iron gates, past a beautiful church, and then suddenly we are in a village street full of stately Indian soldiers.

It betrays no military secret to say that commonly the rare tourist to the British offensive passes through Albert, with its great modern red cathedral smashed to pieces and the great gilt Madonna and Child that once surmounted the tower now, as everyone knows, hanging out horizontally in an attitude that irresistibly

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 The Contrast by Royall Tyler:

Where have you been, my dear?

CHARLOTTE

Why, I have been about to twenty shops, turning over pretty things, and so have left twenty visits unpaid. I wish you would step into the carriage and whisk round, make my apology, and leave my cards where our friends are not at home; that, you know, will serve as a visit. Come, do go.

LETITIA

So anxious to get me out! but I'll watch you. [Aside.] Oh! yes, I'll go; I want a little exercise.