| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: single Secretary or alone, from the Executive Mansion to the War
Department and back. In summer he rode through lonely roads from
the White House to the Soldiers' Home in the dusk of the evening,
and returned to his work in the morning before the town was
astir. He was greatly annoyed when it was decided that there must
be a guard at the Executive Mansion, and that a squad of cavalry
must accompany him on his daily drive; but he was always
reasonable, and yielded to the best judgment of others.
Four years of threats and boastings that were unfounded, and of
plots that came to nothing passed away, until precisely at the
time when the triumph of the nation seemed assured, and a
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner: elbowed chair in which she passed her life, and waddled out to look at it.
Not far off was Waldo, who, having thrown a pail of food into the pigsty,
now leaned over the sod wall looking at the pigs. Half of the sty was dry,
but the lower half was a pool of mud, on the edge of which the mother sow
lay with closed eyes, her ten little ones sucking; the father pig, knee-
deep in the mud, stood running his snout into a rotten pumpkin and
wriggling his curled tail.
Waldo wondered dreamily as he stared why they were pleasant to look at.
Taken singly they were not beautiful; taken together they were. Was it not
because there was a certain harmony about them? The old sow was suited to
the little pigs, and the little pigs to their mother, the old boar to the
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