| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: Strasburg this day month.
I hope, continued the stranger, stroking down the face of his mule with his
left hand as he was going to mount it, that you have been kind to this
faithful slave of mine--it has carried me and my cloak-bag, continued he,
tapping the mule's back, above six hundred leagues.
--'Tis a long journey, Sir, replied the master of the inn--unless a man has
great business.--Tut! tut! said the stranger, I have been at the promontory
of Noses; and have got me one of the goodliest, thank Heaven, that ever
fell to a single man's lot.
Whilst the stranger was giving this odd account of himself, the master of
the inn and his wife kept both their eyes fixed full upon the stranger's
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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 Finished by H. Rider Haggard: "I remember that just before the Zulu War Nomkubulwana appeared
revealing something or other which had a great effect throughout
the land."
The use made of this strange traditional Guardian Angel in the
following tale is not therefore an unsupported flight of fancy,
and the same may be said of many other incidents, such as the
account of the reading of the proclamation annexing the Transvaal
at Pretoria in 1877, which have been introduced to serve the
purposes of the romance.
Mameena, who haunts its pages, in a literal as well as figurative
sense, is the heroine of _Child of Storm,_ a book to which she
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