| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Bunner Sisters by Edith Wharton: horses, and the car, still empty, jogged away toward Hoboken.
Ann Eliza, left alone by the roadside, began to move
cautiously forward, looking about for a small red house with a
gable overhung by an elm-tree; but everything about her seemed
unfamiliar and forbidding. One or two surly looking men slouched
past with inquisitive glances, and she could not make up her mind
to stop and speak to them.
At length a tow-headed boy came out of a swinging door
suggestive of illicit conviviality, and to him Ann Eliza ventured
to confide her difficulty. The offer of five cents fired him with
an instant willingness to lead her to Mrs. Hochmuller, and he was
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Out of Time's Abyss by Edgar Rice Burroughs: have been collecting human skulls from their enemies and their
own dead--enough to have built an entire city of them.
Feeling his way along the narrow ledge, Bradley came presently to
a blank wall that stretched out over the water swirling beneath
him, as far as he could reach. Stooping, he groped about with
one hand, reaching down toward the surface of the water, and
discovered that the bottom of the wall arched above the stream.
How much space there was between the water and the arch he could
not tell, nor how deep the former. There was only one way in
which he might learn these things, and that was to lower himself
into the stream. For only an instant he hesitated weighing
Out of Time's Abyss |
