| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs: don't care who you capture; but I'm goin' to get Bridgie out
first. I ken do it with twenty-five men--if it ain't too late.
Then, if you want to, you can shoot up the town. Lemme
have the twenty-five, an' you hang around the edges with the
rest of 'em 'til I'm done. Whaddaya say?"
Pesita was willing to agree to anything, and so it came that
half an hour later Billy Byrne was leading a choice selection of
some two dozen cutthroats down through the hills toward
Cuivaca. While a couple of miles in the rear followed Pesita
with the balance of his band.
Billy rode until the few remaining lights of Cuivaca shone
The Mucker |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: frontier, Harpagus sent a hunter to young Cyrus with a fresh-killed
hare, telling him to open it in private; and how, sewn up in it was
the letter, telling him that the time to rebel was come, I am
inclined to say, That must be true. It is so beneath the dignity of
history, so quaint and unexpected, that it is all the more likely
NOT to have been invented.
So with that other story--How young Cyrus, giving out that his
grandfather had made him general of the Persians, summoned them all,
each man with a sickle in his hand, into a prairie full of thorns,
and bade them clear it in one day; and how when they, like loyal
men, had finished, he bade them bathe, and next day he took them
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