| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London: big cedar canoe; and with them she threaded the hazardous chaos of
the Alaskan and Canadian coasts, till the Straits of Juan de Fuca
were passed and she led her boy by the hand up the hard pave of
Seattle.
There she met Sandy MacPherson, on a windy corner, very much
surprised and, when he had heard her story, very wroth--not so
wroth as he might have been, had he known of Kitty Sharon; but of
her Jees Uck breathed not a word, for she had never believed.
Sandy, who read commonplace and sordid desertion into the
circumstance, strove to dissuade her from her trip to San
Francisco, where Neil Bonner was supposed to live when he was at
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Water-Babies by Charles Kingsley: earnest, as if the best part of the day's work was to come. More
than half of them were nasty, dirty, frowzy, grubby, smelly old
monks, who, because they dare not hit a man of their own size,
amused themselves with beating little children instead; as you may
see in the picture of old Pope Gregory (good man and true though he
was, when he meddled with things which he did understand), teaching
children to sing their fa-fa-mi-fa with a cat-o'-nine tails under
his chair: but, because they never had any children of their own,
they took into their heads (as some folks do still) that they were
the only people in the world who knew how to manage children: and
they first brought into England, in the old Anglo-Saxon times, the
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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 Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac: pause, "and this tranquillity has nothing painful to me about it. To
you alone can I dare to say that I feel I am happy. I was surfeited
with adoration, weary of pleasure, emotional on the surface of things,
but conscious that emotion itself never reached my heart. I have found
all the men whom I have known petty, paltry, superficial; none of them
ever caused me a surprise; they had no innocence, no grandeur, no
delicacy. I wish I could have met with one man able to inspire me with
respect."
"Then are you like me, my dear?" asked the marquise; "have you never
felt the emotion of love while trying to love?"
"Never," replied the princess, laying her hand on the arm of her
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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 The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln: been supplied."
Helen rose slowly to her feet, stretching her cramped limbs
carefully as she did so, and sank down in the nearest chair. Her
attitude indicated dejection.
"Then we can't find the envelope," she muttered. "Hurry, Babs, and
close the outer door; father may return at any moment."
Barbara obeyed the injunction with such alacrity that the door,
concealing the space in the wall where stood the safe, flew to with
a bang and the twins jumped nervously.
"Take care!" exclaimed Helen sharply. "Do you wish to arouse the
household?"
The Red Seal |
