The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: Only now, when the extraordinary pace we were going at took my
breath away, I noticed that he was very drunk. He must have been
drinking at the station. At the bottom of the descent there was
the crash of ice; a piece of dirty frozen snow thrown up from the
road hit me a painful blow in the face.
The runaway horses ran up the hill as rapidly as they had
downhill, and before I had time to shout to Nikanor my sledge was
flying along on the level in an old pine forest, and the tall
pines were stretching out their shaggy white paws to me from all
directions.
"I have gone out of my mind, and the coachman's drunk," I
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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 The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: to his test?--set a trap for me?--expose me as a slanderer of my own
town before my own people assembled in a public hall? It was
preposterous; it was impossible. His test would contain only the
kindly opening clause of my remark. Of that I had no shadow of
doubt. You would have thought as I did. You would not have
expected a base betrayal from one whom you had befriended and
against whom you had committed no offence. And so with perfect
confidence, perfect trust, I wrote on a piece of paper the opening
words--ending with "Go, and reform," --and signed it. When I was
about to put it in an envelope I was called into my back office, and
without thinking I left the paper lying open on my desk." He
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |