| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: lobby till I come.
Yours in haste,
M. FINSBURY.
P.S.--Be sure and leave the barrel in the lobby.
'No,' said Gideon, 'there seems to be nothing about the
monument,' and he nodded, as he spoke, at the marble legs. 'Miss
Hazeltine,' he continued, 'would you mind me asking a few
questions?'
'Certainly not,' replied Julia; 'and if you can make me
understand why Morris has sent a statue of Hercules instead of a
barrel containing specimens for a friend, I shall be grateful
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: have been of the faintest use to you. I know what it
was that he wrote to Gafferson,--I couldn't understand
it when he first told me, but afterwards I saw through
it,--and it was merely a maudlin misapprehension of his.
He'd got three or four things all mixed up together.
You've never met your friend Tavender, I believe? You'd
enjoy him at Hadlow House. He smells of rum a hundred
yards off. What little brain he's got left is soaked in it.
The first time I was ever camping with him, I had to lick
him for drinking the methylated spirits we were using with
our tin stove. Oh, you'd have liked him!"
The Market-Place |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from In a German Pension by Katherine Mansfield: beautiful suit!"
"Surely I wore it last summer when you were here? I brought the silk from
China--smuggled it through the Russian customs by swathing it round my
body. And such a quantity: two dress lengths for my sister-in-law, three
suits for myself, a cloak for the housekeeper of my flat in Munich. How I
perspired! Every inch of it had to be washed afterwards."
"Surely you have had more adventures than any man in Germany. When I think
of the time that you spent in Turkey with a drunken guide who was bitten by
a mad dog and fell over a precipice into a field of attar of roses, I
lament that you have not written a book."
"Time--time. I am getting a few notes together. And now that you are here
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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 A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: immutable granite masses that surrounded him. His eyes moved slowly,
his body remaining rigid as though he were petrified. Then, having
cast upon us that look which struck us like a blow, he turned his eyes
once more to the limitless ocean, and gazed upon it, in spite of its
dazzling light, as eagles gaze at the sun, without lowering his
eyelids. Try to remember, dear uncle, one of those old oaks, whose
knotty trunks, from which the branches have been lopped, rise with
weird power in some lonely place, and you will have an image of this
man. Here was a ruined Herculean frame, the face of an Olympian Jove,
destroyed by age, by hard sea toil, by grief, by common food, and
blackened as it were by lightning. Looking at his hard and hairy
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