| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young: little girls liked to hear.
Every afternoon all the nurses came to the Mall and brought all the
babies, and the nurses rolled the babies up and down the sawdust
walks in the pretty baby-carriages, with nice white, and pink, and
blue parasols over the babies' heads.
That afternoon Sister Helen Vincula stayed a long time with Bessie
Bell, on the Mall, sitting by her on the stone bench and listening
to the gay music, and looking at the children in their prettiest
clothes, and at the nurses rolling the babies in the pretty
carriages with the beautiful pink, and white, and blue parasols over
the babies' heads.
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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 Lost Princess of Oz by L. Frank Baum: and he who acts promptly is sure to win. This makes a very good
prison, from which I am sure you cannot escape. Please amuse
yourselves in any way you like, but I must beg you to excuse me, as I
have business in another part of my castle."
Saying this, he opened a trap door in the floor of his cage (which was
now over his head) and climbed through it and disappeared from their
view. The diamond dishpan still remained in the cage, but the bars
kept it from falling down on their heads.
"Well, I declare," said the Patchwork Girl, seizing one of the bars of
the chandelier and swinging from it, "we must peg one for the
Shoemaker, for he has trapped us very cleverly."
The Lost Princess of Oz |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Large Catechism by Dr. Martin Luther: This commandment, therefore, according to its gross sense, does not
concern us Christians; for it is altogether an external matter, like
other ordinances of the Old Testament, which were attached to
particular customs, persons, times, and places, and now have been made
free through Christ. But to grasp a Christian meaning for the simple as
to what God requires in this commandment, note that we keep holy days
not for the sake of intelligent and learned Christians (for they have
no need of it [holy days]), but first of all for bodily causes and
necessities, which nature teaches and requires; for the common people,
man-servants and maid-servants, who have been attending to their work
and trade the whole week, that for a day they may retire in order to
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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 Iron Puddler by James J. Davis: leader. Bill decided to be a leader without qualifying for it,
and history tells the rest.
I circulated among the audiences that were listening to other
candidates and waited for the men to express their opinions. I
heard one stalwart old fellow declare he was going to vote for
Jazz. "Jazz is the fellow we want for City Clerk," I heard him
tell his comrades. I had never heard of Jazz in those days: Jazz
was decidedly a dark horse. But the man was strong for him and
wanted his friends to vote the same way.
There is a trick that was often used in small-town elections.
When the "reform element" made a fight on the "old gang" it was
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