| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Footnote to History by Robert Louis Stevenson: the manifest intention to attack the Tamaseses, or (in other words)
"to trespass on German lands, covered, as your Excellency knows,
with flags." I quote from his requisition to Fritze, December
17th. Upon all these considerations, he goes on, it is necessary
to bring the fighting to an end. Both parties are to be disarmed
and returned to their villages - Mataafa first. And in case of any
attempt upon Apia, the roads thither are to be held by a strong
landing-party. Mataafa was to be disarmed first, perhaps rightly
enough in his character of the last insurgent. Then was to have
come the turn of Tamasese; but it does not appear the disarming
would have had the same import or have been gone about in the same
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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 Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: see it, brutally seizes and destroys the tell-tale document;
and then - you disbelieve your eyes - down goes the whole
story with unsparing truth and in the cruellest detail. It
seems he has no design but to appear respectable, and here he
keeps a private book to prove he was not. You are at first
faintly reminded of some of the vagaries of the morbid
religious diarist; but at a moment's thought the resemblance
disappears. The design of Pepys is not at all to edify; it
is not from repentance that he chronicles his peccadilloes,
for he tells us when he does repent, and, to be just to him,
there often follows some improvement. Again, the sins of the
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