| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: they fairly drove me away. Mother nagged at me
for being idle, and the old man said he would cut
my soul out of my body rather than let me go to
sea. Well, it looked as if he would do it too--so I
went. It looks to me sometimes as if I had been
born to them by a mistake--in that other hutch of
a house."
"Where ought you to have been born by
rights?" Bessie Carvil interrupted him, defiantly.
"In the open, upon a beach, on a windy night,"
he said, quick as lightning. Then he mused slowly.
To-morrow |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: support. The worth of native testimony is small, the worth of
white testimony not overwhelming; and I am in the painful position
of not being able to subscribe either to Klein's own account of the
affair or to that of his accusers. Klein was extremely flurried;
his interest as a reporter must have tempted him at first to make
the most of his share in the exploit, the immediate peril in which
he soon found himself to stand must have at least suggested to him
the idea of minimising it; one way and another, he is not a good
witness. As for the natives, they were no doubt cross-examined in
that hall of terror, the German consulate, where they might be
trusted to lie like schoolboys, or (if the reader prefer it) like
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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 The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: happened, deeply religious, who was caught one evening by the
excitement of plundering--and stole and hid, twisted the wrist of a
boy until it broke, and was afterwards overcome by wild remorse.
I watched Evesham listening intently. "Strange," he said, "very
strange. We are such stuff as thieves are made of. And in China,
too, they murdered people--for the sake of murdering. Apart, so to
speak, from mercenary considerations. I'm afraid there's no doubt
of it in certain cases. No doubt at all. Young soldiers fresh from
German high schools and English homes!"
"Did OUR people?" asked some patriot.
"Not so much. But I'm afraid there were cases. . . . Some of the
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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 Desert Gold by Zane Grey: bathed and bound it, and laid the cavalryman against the slant
of the bank, his head high to lessen the probability of bleeding.
As Gale straightened up Ladd muttered low and deep, and swung
the heavy rifle around to the left. Far along the slope a figure
moved. Ladd began to work the lever of the Winchester and to
shoot. At every shot the heavy firearm sprang up, and the recoil
made Ladd's shoulder give back. Gale saw the bullets strike the
lava behind, beside, before the fleeing Mexican, sending up dull
puffs of dust. On the sixth shot he plunged down out of sight,
either hit or frightened into seeking cover.
"Dick, mebbe there's one or two left above; but we needn't figure
Desert Gold |
