Today's Stichomancy for H. G. Wells

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton:

(a rejected suitor) was putting poison in her tea; she had a customer who was shadowed by detectives, and another (a very wealthy lady) who had been arrested in a department store for kleptomania; she had been present at a spiritualist seance where an old gentleman had died in a fit on seeing a materialization of his mother-in-law; she had escaped from two fires in her night-gown, and at the funeral of her first cousin the horses attached to the hearse had run away and smashed the coffin, precipitating her relative into an open man-hole before the eyes of his distracted family.

A sceptical observer might have explained Miss Mellins's

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

Deuteronomy 32: 15 But Jeshurun waxed fat, and kicked--thou didst wax fat, thou didst grow thick, thou didst become gross--and he forsook God who made him, and contemned the Rock of his salvation.

Deuteronomy 32: 16 They roused Him to jealousy with strange gods, with abominations did they provoke Him.

Deuteronomy 32: 17 They sacrificed unto demons, no-gods, gods that they knew not, new gods that came up of late, which your fathers dreaded not.

Deuteronomy 32: 18 Of the Rock that begot thee thou wast unmindful, and didst forget God that bore thee.

Deuteronomy 32: 19 And the LORD saw, and spurned, because of the provoking of His sons and His daughters.

Deuteronomy 32: 20 And He said: 'I will hide My face from them, I will see what their end shall be; for they are a very froward generation, children in whom is no faithfulness.

Deuteronomy 32: 21 They have roused Me to jealousy with a no-god; they have provoked Me with their vanities; and I will rouse them to jealousy with a no-people; I will provoke them with a vile nation.

Deuteronomy 32: 22 For a fire is kindled in My nostril, and burneth unto the depths of the nether-world, and devoureth the earth with her produce, and setteth ablaze the foundations of the mountains.

Deuteronomy 32: 23 I will heap evils upon them; I will spend Mine arrows upon them;

The Tanach

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sylvie and Bruno by Lewis Carroll:

"Who are the audience to be?"

"Only but Frogs," said Bruno. "But they haven't comed yet. They wants to be drove up, like sheep."

"Would it save time," I suggested, "if I were to walk round with Sylvie, to drive up the Frogs, while you get the Theatre ready?"

"That are a good plan!" cried Bruno. "But where are Sylvie?"

"I'm here!" said Sylvie, peeping over the edge of the bank. "I was just watching two Frogs that were having a race."

"Which won it? "Bruno eagerly inquired.

Sylvie was puzzled. "He does ask such hard questions!" she confided to me.

Sylvie and Bruno

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 An Old Maid by Honore de Balzac:

"And to think that my uncle told me nothing! thinks of nothing! inquires nothing! That's my uncle all over. He'd forget his own nose if it wasn't fastened to his face."

Have you never remarked that, under circumstances such as these, old maids become, like Richard III., keen-witted, fierce, bold, promissory,--if one may so use the word,--and, like inebriate clerks, no longer in awe of anything?

Immediately the town of Alencon, speedily informed from the farther end of the rue de Saint-Blaise to the gate of Seez of this precipitate return, accompanied by singular circumstances, was perturbed throughout its viscera, both public and domestic. Cooks, shopkeepers,