Today's Stichomancy for John Dillinger

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain:

his body sawed drunkenly about with the weaving motion of the ship. He drained another glass to the dregs, whilst the cards were being dealt.

He took his hand, glanced at it, and his dull eyes lit up for a moment. The gamblers observed it, and showed their gratification by hardly perceptible signs.

'How many cards?'

'None! ' said Backus.

One villain--named Hank Wiley--discarded one card, the others three each. The betting began. Heretofore the bets had been trifling-- a dollar or two; but Backus started off with an eagle now,

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

huntsman has only to call in the hounds and beat up another. If not, his business is to follow up the pack full speed, and not give in, but on through thick and through thin, for toil is sweet. And if again they chance upon her in the chevy,[31] his cheery shout will be heard once more, "Right so! right so, hounds! forward on, good hounds!"

[31] {apantosi diokousai auton}, al. "come across the huntsman again."

But if the pack have got too long a start of him, and he cannot overtake them, however eagerly he follows up the hunt--perhaps he has altogether missed the chase, or even if they are ranging close and giving tongue and sticking to the scent, he cannot see them--still as he tears along he can interrogate the passer-by: "Hilloa there, have

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Secrets of the Princesse de Cadignan by Honore de Balzac:

realize the simplicity that constant work and solitude leave in the heart; all that love--reduced to a mere need, and now repugnant, beside an ignoble woman--excites of regret and longings for diviner sentiments in the higher regions of the soul. D'Arthez was, indeed, the child, the boy that Madame de Cadignan had recognized. An illumination something like his own had taken place in the beautiful Diane. At last she had met that superior man whom all women desire and seek, if only to make a plaything of him,--that power which they consent to obey, if only for the pleasure of subduing it; at last she had found the grandeurs of the intellect united with the simplicity of a heart all new to love; and she saw, with untold happiness, that

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 Walking by Henry David Thoreau:

and woodchoppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Walking