| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Marie by H. Rider Haggard: front of whom waddled Dingaan arrayed in his bead dancing dress. He was
supported by two stalwart body-servants, whilst a third held a shield
over his head to protect him from the sun, and a fourth carried a large
stool, upon which he was to sit. Behind each party, also, I perceived a
number of Zulus in their war-dress, all of them armed with broad
stabbing spears.
The two parties arrived at the stone upon which I was sitting almost
simultaneously, as probably it had been arranged that they should do,
and halted, staring at each other. As for me, I sat still upon my stone
and smoked on.
"Allemachte! Allan," puffed the Vrouw Prinsloo, who was breathless with
Marie |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs. They were
cold, these marble squares of his youth; but HE somehow was not, in
this rich return of consciousness - the most wonderful hour, little
by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so
gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet as with a treasure of
intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation;
dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the place and producing
the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. He had come back, yes
- come back from further away than any man but himself had ever
travelled; but it was strange how with this sense what he had come
back TO seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Recruit by Honore de Balzac: grief, or illness afflicted her. In reply to these questions, an old
housekeeper named Brigitte informed them that her mistress had shut
herself up in her room and would see no one, not even the servants of
the house. The semi-cloistral existence of the inhabitants of a little
town creates so invincible a habit of analyzing and explaining the
actions of their neighbors, that after compassionating Madame de Dey
(without knowing whether she were happy or unhappy), they proceeded to
search for the reasons of this sudden retreat.
"If she were ill," said the first Inquisitive, "she would have sent
for the doctor; but the doctor has been all day long playing chess
with me. He told me, laughing, that in these days there was but one
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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 Little Britain by Washington Irving: The old games of Pope-Joan and Tom-come-tickle-me are
entirely discarded; there is no such thing as getting up an
honest country dance; and on my attempting to kiss a young
lady under the mistletoe last Christmas, I was indignantly
repulsed; the Miss Lambs having pronounced it "shocking
vulgar." Bitter rivalry has also broken out as to the most
fashionable part of Little Britain; the Lambs standing up for the
dignity of the Cross-Keys Square, and the Trotters for the
vicinity of St. Bartholomew's.
Thus is this little territory torn by factions and internal
dissensions, like the great empire who name it bears; and what
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