| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Whirligigs by O. Henry: Vesey butted into the circle of cipher readers very much
as Heffelbauer's "code" would have done, and asked
what was up. Some one explained, with the touch of
half-familiar condescension that they always used toward
him. Vesey reached out and took the cablegram from
the m. e.'s hand. Under the protection of some special
Providence, he was always doing appalling things like
that, and coming, off unscathed.
"It's a code," said Vesey. "Anybody got the key?"
"The office has no code," said Boyd, reaching for the
message. Vesey held to it.
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Kwaidan by Lafcadio Hearn: greatly. After Akiko had been buried, he made a vow never to marry; and he
built this little house beside the cemetery, so that he might be always
near her grave. All this happened more than fifty years ago. And every day
of those fifty years -- winter and summer alike -- your uncle went to the
cemetery, and prayed at the grave, and swept the tomb, and set offerings
before it. But he did not like to have any mention made of the matter; and
he never spoke of it... So, at last, Akiko came for him: the white
butterfly was her soul."
IV
I had almost forgotten to mention an ancient Japanese dance, called the
Butterfly Dance (Kocho-Mai), which used to be performed in the Imperial
Kwaidan |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Ball at Sceaux by Honore de Balzac: Supremely impertinent to all newly-created nobility, she made every
effort to get her parents recognized as equals by the most illustrious
families of the Saint-Germain quarter.
These sentiments had not escaped the observing eye of Monsieur de
Fontaine, who more than once, when his two elder girls were married,
had smarted under Emilie's sarcasm. Logical readers will be surprised
to see the old Royalist bestowing his eldest daughter on a Receiver-
General, possessed, indeed, of some old hereditary estates, but whose
name was not preceded by the little word to which the throne owed so
many partisans, and his second to a magistrate too lately Baronified
to obscure the fact that his father had sold firewood. This noteworthy
|
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 To-morrow by Joseph Conrad: learned to laugh at them: there was no harm in
him. Now she was aware of an unacknowledged,
pleasurable, incredulous emotion, expressed by a
faint blush. He winked not in the least vulgarly;
his thin red face with a well-modelled curved nose,
had a sort of distinction--the more so that when he
talked to her he looked with a steadier and more in-
telligent glance. A handsome, hale, upright, ca-
pable man, with a white beard. You did not think
of his age. His son, he affirmed, had resembled
him amazingly from his earliest babyhood.
To-morrow |
