| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: keep my jewelry which is, as you know, of considerable value. I
will tell him that I am going away for a while and ask him to take
charge of it for me. I, myself, will take him down to the door and
let him out, when I have satisfied myself that the old servant is
in bed or at least at the back of the house. The revolver which
shall end my misery is Graumann's property. I took it from its
place without his knowledge.
The 10,000 gulden which I told my landlady were still in the house,
and which would therefore be thought missing after my death, I have
deposited in a bank in Frankfort in your name. Here is the
certificate of deposit.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Little Britain by Washington Irving: every window, watching the crazy vehicles rumble by; and
there was a knot of virulent old cronies, that kept a lookout
from a house just opposite the retired butcher's, and scanned
and criticised every one that knocked at the door.
This dance was a cause of almost open war, and the whole
neighborhood declared they would have nothing more to say to
the Lambs. It is true that Mrs. Lamb, when she had no
engagements with her quality acquaintance, would give little
humdrum tea-junketings to some of her old cronies, "quite," as
she would say, "in a friendly way;" and it is equally true that
her invitations were always accepted, in spite of all previous
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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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: which I had not well mastered. Another unalloyed dramatic pleasure
which Fleeming and I shared the year of the Paris Exposition, was
the MARQUIS DE VILLEMER, that blameless play, performed by
Madeleine Brohan, Delaunay, Worms, and Broisat - an actress, in
such parts at least, to whom I have never seen full justice
rendered. He had his fill of weeping on that occasion; and when
the piece was at an end, in front of a cafe, in the mild, midnight
air, we had our fill of talk about the art of acting.
But what gave the stage so strong a hold on Fleeming was an
inheritance from Norwich, from Edward Barron, and from Enfield of
the SPEAKER. The theatre was one of Edward Barron's elegant
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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 Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: future state of humanity in which the active majority would consist of
semi-female workers and Amazons toiling for an inactive minority of
selected Mothers. Even in his chapter, "Human Population in the Future,"
Mr. Spencer has attempted no detailed statement of the physical
modifications inevitable to the production of higher moral types,-- though
his general statement in regard to a perfected nervous system, and a great
diminution of human fertility, suggests that such moral evolution would
signify a very considerable amount of physical change. If it be legitimate
to believe in a future humanity to which the pleasure of mutual beneficence
will represent the whole joy of life, would it not also be legitimate to
imagine other transformations, physical and moral, which the facts of
Kwaidan |
