| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: instead of tolerating a discussion which she did not know how to
end with dignity. He relieved her by adding unexpectedly:
"Your system was the cause of my absurd marriage. My wife
acquired a degree of culture and reasonableness from her training
here which made her seem a superior being among the chatterers
who form the female seasoning in ordinary society. I admired her
dark eyes, and was only too glad to seize the excuse her
education offered me for believing her a match for me in mind as
well as in body."
Miss Wilson, astonished, determined to tell him coldly that her
time was valuable. But curiosity took possession of her in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis: and hunger,--even more fit to be a type of her class. Deeper
yet if one could look, was there nothing worth reading in this
wet, faded thing, halfcovered with ashes? no story of a soul
filled with groping passionate love, heroic unselfishness,
fierce jealousy? of years of weary trying to please the one
human being whom she loved, to gain one look of real heart-
kindness from him? If anything like this were hidden beneath
the pale, bleared eyes, and dull, washed-out-looking face, no
one had ever taken the trouble to read its faint signs: not the
half-clothed furnace-tender, Wolfe, certainly. Yet he was kind
to her: it was his nature to be kind, even to the very rats
Life in the Iron-Mills |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain: on your uncle, of course, because he's a preacher and
hain't got any business to quarrel. Your aunt Sally
says he hates to go into the pulpit he's so ashamed;
and the people have begun to cool toward him, and he ain't
as popular now as he used to was."
"Well, ain't it strange? Why, Aunt Polly,
he was always so good and kind and moony and
absent-minded and chuckle-headed and lovable--why,
he was just an angel! What CAN be the matter of him,
do you reckon?"
CHAPTER II. JAKE DUNLAP
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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 Complete Angler by Izaak Walton: March and April he is usually taken with worms; in May, June, and
July, he will bite at any fly, or at cherries, or at beetles with their legs
and wings cut off, or at any kind of snail, or at the black bee that breeds
in clay walls. And he never refuses a grasshopper, on the top of a swift
stream, nor, at the bottom, the young humble bee that breeds in long
grass, and is ordinarily found by the mower of it. In August, and in the
cooler months, a yellow paste, made of the strongest cheese, and
pounded in a mortar, with a little butter and saffron, so much of it as,
being beaten small, will turn it to a lemon colour. And some make a
paste for the winter months, at which time the Chub is accounted best,
for then it is observed, that the forked bones are lost, or turned into a
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