Today's Stichomancy for T. E. Lawrence

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Emerald City of Oz by L. Frank Baum:

The Emerald City is built all of beautiful marbles in which are set a profusion of emeralds, every one exquisitely cut and of very great size. There are other jewels used in the decorations inside the houses and palaces, such as rubies, diamonds, sapphires, amethysts and turquoises. But in the streets and upon the outside of the buildings only emeralds appear, from which circumstance the place is named the Emerald City of Oz. It has nine thousand, six hundred and fifty-four buildings, in which lived fifty-seven thousand three hundred and eighteen people, up to the time my story opens.

All the surrounding country, extending to the borders of the desert which enclosed it upon every side, was full of pretty and comfortable

The Emerald City of Oz

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare:

Reason, in itself confounded, Saw division grow together; To themselves yet either-neither, Simple were so well compounded.

That it cried how true a twain Seemeth this concordant one! Love hath reason, reason none If what parts can so remain.

Whereupon it made this threne To the phoenix and the dove, Co-supreme and stars of love;

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The $30,000 Bequest and Other Stories by Mark Twain:

semi-annual dividend. You can spend part of that."

"Shucks, only THAT--and a whole year to wait! Confound it, I--"

"Oh, do be patient! It might even be declared in three months-- it's quite within the possibilities."

"Oh, jolly! oh, thanks!" and Sally jumped up and kissed his wife in gratitude. "It'll be three thousand--three whole thousand! how much of it can we spend, Aleck? Make it liberal!--do, dear, that's a good fellow."

Aleck was pleased; so pleased that she yielded to the pressure and conceded a sum which her judgment told her was a foolish extravagance-- a thousand dollars. Sally kissed her half a dozen times and even

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 Brother of Daphne by Dornford Yates:

were seven, before you had put off the white mantle of innocence and assumed the cloak of depravity. It has been my unhappy lot to be frequently in your company ever since, and, speaking from a long and distasteful experience of you and your ways, I am quite satisfied that, if you did meet with some slight contretemps, you made no whole-hearted effort to rejoin us in time to degrade your intellect by discussing the sort of topics which appeal to that genus of hopeless wasters which the Wilsons adorn."

"Was it very bad?" said I.

"Bad?" said Jonah. "Bad? When a woman with six male children leads off by telling you that she keeps a book in which she has

The Brother of Daphne