Today's Stichomancy for Chuck Yeager

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Buttered Side Down by Edna Ferber:

"Rap-rap-rap!" sounded sharply from the head of her bed.

Gertie stopped sobbing, and her heart stopped ,beating. She lay tense and still, listening. Everyone knows that spooks rap three times at the head of one's bed. It's a regular high-sign with them.

"Rap-rap-rap!"

Gertie's skin became goose-flesh, and coldwater effects chased up and down her spine.

"What's your trouble in there?" demanded an unspooky voice so near that Gertie jumped. "Sick?"

It was the Kid Next Door.

Buttered Side Down

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Enoch Arden, &c. by Alfred Tennyson:

Stept thro' the stately minuet of those days: But Edith's eager fancy hurried with him Snatch'd thro' the perilous passes of his life: Till Leolin ever watchful of her eye Hated him with a momentary hate. Wife-hunting, as the rumor ran, was he: I know not, for he spoke not, only shower'd His oriental gifts on everyone And most on Edith: like a storm he came, And shook the house, and like a storm he went.

Among the gifts he left her (possibly

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Country of the Pointed Firs by Sarah Orne Jewett:

I hired the schoolhouse for the rest of the vacation for fifty cents a week.

Selfish as it may appear, the retired situation seemed to possess great advantages, and I spent many days there quite undisturbed, with the sea-breeze blowing through the small, high windows and swaying the heavy outside shutters to and fro. I hung my hat and luncheon-basket on an entry nail as if I were a small scholar, but I sat at the teacher's desk as if I were that great authority, with all the timid empty benches in rows before me. Now and then an idle sheep came and stood for a long time looking in at the door. At sundown I went back, feeling most businesslike, down

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 A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson:

To My Mother

You too, my mother, read my rhymes For love of unforgotten times, And you may chance to hear once more The little feet along the floor.

III To Auntie

"Chief of our aunts"--not only I, But all your dozen of nurselings cry-- "What did the other children do? And what were childhood, wanting you?"

A Child's Garden of Verses