| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poor and Proud by Oliver Optic: placing a cent on her tray.
Katy started at the words, and reproved herself for her want of
meekness. She might, perhaps, have sold half a dozen sticks of
candy while she had been watching the sour gentleman, and
persuading herself that she had been very badly used. She tore
off a piece of paper, in which she wrapped up the candy for the
purchaser, and handed it to her.
"Thank you," said she, as she picked up the copper, and
transferred it to her pocket.
"Your candy looks very nice," added the lady evidently pleased
with Katy's polite manners.
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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 Touchstone by Edith Wharton: and that the lowest dregs of it, the very bottom-slime, was the
hateful necessity of having always, as long as the two men lived,
to be civil to Barton Flamel.
VI
THE week in town had been sultry, and the men, in the Sunday
emancipation of white flannel and duck, filled the deck-chairs of
the yacht with their outstretched apathy, following, through a
mist of cigarette-smoke, the flitting inconsequences of the women.
The part was a small one--Flamel had few intimate friends--but
composed of more heterogeneous atoms than the little pools into
which society usually runs. The reaction from the chief episode
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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 Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: * As we pass through earthly life so quickly and only once, how sad
that our fear of rejection is so often stronger than our love.
Seeing is Believing
One day an idle young man was wandering through the woods not far
from his town when he happened upon an old woman standing around a
rather smoky fire and stirring a kettle. Being the modern young man
that he was, he immediately blurted out his first impression:
"Gosh, you're ugly and whatever you're cooking stinks," he told her.
"Well, if you don't like my looks," answered the old woman, "I can
fix that." She then spoke a few strange words, which were followed
by a dramatic puff of smoke, and the young man discovered, not that
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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 One Basket by Edna Ferber: appalled: "Joey, it's my dying wish. Promise!"
"I promise, Ma," he had said.
Whereupon his mother had died, comfortably, leaving him with a
completely ruined life.
They were not bad-looking girls, and they had a certain style,
too. That is, Stell and Eva had. Carrie, the middle one, taught
school over on the West Side. In those days it took her almost
two hours each way. She said the kind of costume she required
should have been corrugated steel. But all three knew what was
being worn, and they wore it--or fairly faithful copies of it.
Eva, the housekeeping sister, had a needle knack. She could skim
One Basket |
