| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Chinese Boy and Girl by Isaac Taylor Headland: But you be a roller
And hull with power,
And I'll be a millstone
And grind the flour.
As soon as this game was finished our little friend
arranged the children against the wall for another game.
Everything was in readiness. They were about to begin,
when one of the larger girls whispered something in her
ear. She stepped back, put her hands behind her, hung
her head and thought a moment.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Forged Coupon by Leo Tolstoy: hidden from him so long.
From that day onward he spent all his free time
with Chouev, asking him questions and listening
to him. He saw but a single truth at the bottom
of the teaching of Christ as revealed to him by
Chouev: that all men are brethren, and that they
ought to love and pity one another in order that
all might be happy. And when he listened to
Chouev, everything that was consistent with this
fundamental truth came to him like a thing he
had known before and only forgotten since, while
The Forged Coupon |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: collar, and although it seemed ridiculous, with the house sealed
as it is, and all of us friends for years--well, I got up and
looked, and it was gone!"
No one spoke for an instant. It WAS a queer situation, for the
collar was gone; Anne's red eyes showed it was true. And there we
stood, every one of us a miserable picture of guilt, and tried to
look innocent and debonair and unsuspicious. Finally Jim held up
his hand and signified that he wanted to say something.
"It's like this," he said, "until this thing is cleared up, for
Heaven's sake, let's try to be sane! If every fellow thinks the
other fellow did it, this house will be a nice little hell to
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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 Gambara by Honore de Balzac: chatting with a girl who had come to buy her supper, about the divine
Marianna--so poor, so beautiful, so heroically devoted, and who had,
nevertheless, "gone the way of them all," the cook, his wife, and the
street-girl saw coming towards them a woman fearfully thin, with a
sunburned, dusty face; a nervous walking skeleton, looking at the
numbers, and trying to recognize a house.
"/Ecco la Marianna/!" exclaimed the cook.
Marianna recognized Giardini, the erewhile cook, in the poor fellow
she saw, without wondering by what series of disasters he had sunk to
keep a miserable shop for secondhand food. She went in and sat down,
for she had come from Fontainebleau. She had walked fourteen leagues
Gambara |
