| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain: --Pudd'nhead Wilson's Calendar
Wilson put on enough clothes for business purposes and went
to work under a high pressure of steam. He was awake all over.
All sense of weariness had been swept away by the invigorating
refreshment of the great and hopeful discovery which he had made.
He made fine and accurate reproductions of a number of his
"records," and then enlarged them on a scale of ten to one with
his pantograph. He did these pantograph enlargements on sheets
of white cardboard, and made each individual line of the
bewildering maze of whorls or curves or loops which consisted of
the "pattern" of a "record" stand out bold and black by
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson: to Earraid, was more than I could fancy.
A little after, as I was jumping about after my limpets, I was
startled by a guinea-piece, which fell upon a rock in front of me
and glanced off into the sea. When the sailors gave me my money
again, they kept back not only about a third of the whole sum,
but my father's leather purse; so that from that day out, I
carried my gold loose in a pocket with a button. I now saw there
must be a hole, and clapped my hand to the place in a great
hurry. But this was to lock the stable door after the steed was
stolen. I had left the shore at Queensferry with near on fifty
pounds; now I found no more than two guinea-pieces and a silver
Kidnapped |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Reef by Edith Wharton: --haven't you? After all, in old times there must have been
living people here!"
Loosening her arm from his she continued to gaze up at the
house-front, which seemed, in the plaintive decline of
light, to send her back the mute appeal of something doomed.
"It IS beautiful," she said.
"A beautiful memory! Quite perfect to take out and turn over
when I'm grinding at the law in New York, and you're----" He
broke off and looked at her with a questioning smile.
"Come! Tell me. You and I don't have to say things to talk
to each other. When you turn suddenly absentminded and
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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 Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: There was I, sitting in that verandah, in as handsome a piece of
scenery as you could find, a splendid sun, and a fine fresh healthy
trade that stirred up a man's blood like sea-bathing; and the whole
thing was clean gone from me, and I was dreaming England, which is,
after all, a nasty, cold, muddy hole, with not enough light to see
to read by; and dreaming the looks of my public, by a cant of a
broad high-road like an avenue, and with the sign on a green tree.
So much for the morning, but the day passed and the devil anyone
looked near me, and from all I knew of natives in other islands I
thought this strange. People laughed a little at our firm and
their fine stations, and at this station of Falesa in particular;
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