| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: one that will make it sick."
The days drifted along, and the bill of future squanderings rose
higher and higher, wilder and wilder, more and more foolish and
reckless. It began to look as if every member of the nineteen would
not only spend his whole forty thousand dollars before receiving-
day, but be actually in debt by the time he got the money. In some
cases light-headed people did not stop with planning to spend, they
really spent--on credit. They bought land, mortgages, farms,
speculative stocks, fine clothes, horses, and various other things,
paid down the bonus, and made themselves liable for the rest--at ten
days. Presently the sober second thought came, and Halliday noticed
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: flag to protect him, it being a foreign land; then we
sailed off to this and that and t'other distance, to git
what Tom called effects and perspectives and propor-
tions, and Jim he done the best he could, striking all
the different kinds of attitudes and positions he could
study up, but standing on his head and working his
legs the way a frog does was the best. The further we
got away, the littler Jim got, and the grander the
Sphinx got, till at last it was only a clothespin on a
dome, as you might say. That's the way perspective
brings out the correct proportions, Tom said; he said
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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 De Profundis by Oscar Wilde: given her, and spills the odorous spices over his tired dusty feet,
and for that one moment's sake sits for ever with Ruth and Beatrice
in the tresses of the snow-white rose of Paradise. All that Christ
says to us by the way of a little warning is that every moment
should be beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the
coming of the bridegroom, always waiting for the voice of the
lover, Philistinism being simply that side of man's nature that is
not illumined by the imagination. He sees all the lovely
influences of life as modes of light: the imagination itself is
the world of light. The world is made by it, and yet the world
cannot understand it: that is because the imagination is simply a
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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 Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: he could only make fifteen. So he made up his mind to operate a third
suspension of payment. About that time, the great man hit on the idea
of indemnifying his creditors with paper of purely fictitious value
and keeping their coin. On the market, a great idea of this sort is
not expressed in precisely this cut-and-dried way. Such an arrangement
consists in giving a lot of grown-up children a small pie in exchange
for a gold piece; and, like children of a smaller growth, they prefer
the pie to the gold piece, not suspecting that they might have a
couple of hundred pies for it."
"What is this all about, Bixiou?" cried Couture. "Nothing more bona
fide. Not a week passes but pies are offered to the public for a
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