Today's Stichomancy for Thomas Jefferson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Edition of The Ambassadors by Henry James:

nationality. It would be nice if they're Polish!" he almost immediately added.

"Very nice indeed." The transition kept up her spirits. "So you see you do care."

He did this contention a modified justice. "I think I should if they WERE Polish. Yes," he thought--"there might be joy in THAT."

"Let us then hope for it." But she came after this nearer to the question. "If the girl's of the right age of course the mother can't be. I mean for the virtuous attachment. If the girl's twenty--and she can't be less--the mother must be at least forty. So it puts the mother out. SHE'S too old for him."

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Pool of Blood in the Pastor's Study by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner:

mien. A naturally retiring, modest disposition, and two external causes are the reasons for Muller's humbleness of manner, which is his chief characteristic. One cause is the fact that in early youth a miscarriage of justice gave him several years in prison, an experience which cast a stigma on his name and which made it impossible for him, for many years after, to obtain honest employment. But the world is richer, and safer, by Muller's early misfortune. For it was this experience which threw him back on his own peculiar talents for a livelihood, and drove him into the police force. Had he been able to enter any other profession, his genius might have been stunted to a mere pastime,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Verses 1889-1896 by Rudyard Kipling:

In his eye lit the passionless passion of slaughter, And men who had fought with O'Neil for the life Had gazed on his face with less dread than his wife. For she who had held him so long could not hold him -- Though a four-month Eternity should have controlled him -- But watched the twin Terror -- the head turned to head -- The scowling, scarred Black, and the flushed savage Red --

Verses 1889-1896

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 Woman and Labour by Olive Schreiner:

sex towards sex, which, with hunger and thirst, lie, as the triune instincts, at the base of animal life on earth, should ever be exterminable by the comparatively superficial changes resulting from the performance of this or that form of labour, or the little more or less of knowledge in one direction or another.

That the female who drives steam-driven looms, producing scores of yards of linen in a day, should therefore desire less the fellowship of her corresponding male than had she toiled at a spinning-wheel with hand and foot to produce one yard; that the male should desire less of the companionship of the woman who spends the morning in doctoring babies in her consulting-room, according to the formularies of the pharmacopoeia,