| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Start in Life by Honore de Balzac: for Derville is capable, in the interest of his clients, to stick a
spoke in our wheel. Count Felix de Vandernesse is more powerful than
his brother, our client, the ambassador. Therefore keep your eyes
open, and if there's the slightest hitch come back to me at once."
Oscar departed with the full intention of distinguishing himself in
this little skirmish,--the first affair entrusted to him since his
installation as second clerk.
After the departure of Georges and Oscar, Godeschal sounded the new
clerk to discover the joke which, as he thought, lay behind this
Marquise de las Florentinas y Cabirolos. But Frederic, with the
coolness and gravity of a king's attorney, continued his cousin's
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: teeth, so that his words were lost. He pursued Rob Todd (if any one
could have believed Robbie) for the space of half a mile with pitiful
entreaties. But the age is one of incredulity; these superstitious
decorations speedily fell off; and the facts of the story itself, like
the bones of a giant buried there and half dug up, survived, naked and
imperfect, in the memory of the scattered neighbours. To this day, of
winter nights, when the sleet is on the window and the cattle are quiet
in the byre, there will be told again, amid the silence of the young and
the additions and corrections of the old, the tale of the Justice-Clerk
and of his son, young Hermiston, that vanished from men's knowledge; of
the two Kirsties and the Four Black Brothers of the Cauldstaneslap; and
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Ozma of Oz by L. Frank Baum: "But this copper man," continued Dorothy, looking at it with big eyes,
"is not alive at all, and I wonder what it was made for, and why it
was locked up in this queer place."
"That is a mystery," remarked the hen, twisting her head to arrange
her wing-feathers with her bill.
Dorothy stepped inside the little room to get a back view of the
copper man, and in this way discovered a printed card that hung
between his shoulders, it being suspended from a small copper peg at
the back of his neck. She unfastened this card and returned to the
path, where the light was better, and sat herself down upon a slab of
rock to read the printing.
Ozma of Oz |
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 Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs: first sound of her nearer approach. When the final skin had
been removed he rose. Now he heard Sabor in the bushes to
his rear, but not yet too close. Leisurely he gathered up the
six pelts and one of the carcasses, and as the lioness appeared
between the boles of two trees he swung upward into the
branches above him. Here he hung the hides over a limb,
seated himself comfortably upon another with his back against
the bole of the tree, cut a hind quarter from the carcass he had
carried with him and proceeded to satisfy his hunger. Sabor
slunk, growling, from the brush, cast a wary eye upward
toward the ape-man and then fell upon the nearest carcass.
Tarzan the Untamed |
