| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Letters of Two Brides by Honore de Balzac: woman of fashion in Paris can possibly be a good mother.
Good-bye, then, for a short time, dear one. We shall stay at
Chantepleurs only a week at most, and shall be with you about May
10th. So we are actually to meet again after more than two years! What
changes since then! Here we are, both matrons, both in our promised
land--I of love, you of motherhood.
If I have not written, my sweetest, it is not because I have forgotten
you. And what of the monkey godson? Is he still pretty and a credit to
me? He must be more than nine months' old now. I should dearly like to
be present when he makes his first steps upon this earth; but Macumer
tells me that even precocious infants hardly walk at ten months.
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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 Almayer's Folly by Joseph Conrad: and gum-dammar, but the little Flash could outsail every craft in
those seas. A few of them came to grief on hidden sandbanks and
coral reefs, losing their all and barely escaping with life from
the cruel grip of this sunny and smiling sea; others got
discouraged; and for many years the green and peaceful-looking
islands guarding the entrances to the promised land kept their
secret with all the merciless serenity of tropical nature. And
so Lingard came and went on his secret or open expeditions,
becoming a hero in Almayer's eyes by the boldness and enormous
profits of his ventures, seeming to Almayer a very great man
indeed as he saw him marching up the warehouse, grunting a "how
 Almayer's Folly |