Today's Stichomancy for Alyssa Milano

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris:

feathers, fixed them to his stick, and with the resultantly accurate arrow, shot the surprised vulture through the heart.

* In our pride we often unwittingly give our enemies the means to destroy us.

* Perseverance and ingenuity, even in the face of humiliation and defeat, will at last succeed.

[Suggested by Aesop, "The Eagle and Arrow"]

Three Flat Tires

Once in the fullness and complexity of human existence three cars left the same party one rainy night and took three different roads on the way home. Oddly enough, at approximately the same time, each

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Falk by Joseph Conrad:

the whole well behaved. They had fair heads, round eyes, round little knobby noses, and they resembled their father a good deal.

This Diana of Bremen was a most innocent old ship, and seemed to know nothing of the wicked sea, as there are on shore households that know nothing of the corrupt world. And the sentiments she sug- gested were unexceptionable and mainly of a do- mestic order. She was a home. All these dear chil- dren had learned to walk on her roomy quarter-deck. In such thoughts there is something pretty, even

Falk

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman by Thomas Hardy:

yourself."

"I am not, quite, mother," said he.

"About her? Now, my son, I know it that--I know it is about her! Have you quarrelled in these three weeks?"

"We have not exactly quarrelled," he said. "But we have had a difference----"

"Angel--is she a young woman whose history will bear investigation?"

With a mother's instinct Mrs Clare had put her finger on the kind of trouble that would cause such a disquiet as seemed to agitate her son.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, A Pure Woman

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 Songs of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson:

I have longed for all, and bid farewell to hope; And I have lived and loved, and closed the door.

XXIII

HE hears with gladdened heart the thunder Peal, and loves the falling dew; He knows the earth above and under - Sits and is content to view.

He sits beside the dying ember, God for hope and man for friend, Content to see, glad to remember, Expectant of the certain end.