Today's Stichomancy for Edgar Allan Poe

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson:

removal of Mr. James Dove, the foreman smith, with his apparatus, from the rock to the upper part of the beacon, where the forge was now erected on a temporary platform, laid on the cross beams or upper framing. The other was the artificers having dined for the first time upon the rock, their dinner being cooked on board of the yacht, and sent to them by one of the boats. But what afforded the greatest happiness and relief was the removal of the large bellows, which had all along been a source of much trouble and perplexity, by their hampering and incommoding the boat which carried the smiths and their apparatus.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Coxon Fund by Henry James:

pretend that such a responsibility was a simple matter; if it HAD been she wouldn't have attempted to saddle me with any portion of it. The Mulvilles were sympathy itself, but were they absolutely candid? Could they indeed be, in their position--would it even have been to be desired? Yes, she had sent for me to ask no less than that of me--whether there was anything dreadful kept back. She made no allusion whatever to George Gravener--I thought her silence the only good taste and her gaiety perhaps a part of the very anxiety of that discretion, the effect of a determination that people shouldn't know from herself that her relations with the man she was to marry were strained. All the weight, however, that she

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from In the Cage by Henry James:

To Cissy, to Mary, whichever it was, she found her curiosity going out with a rush, a mute effusion that floated back to her, like a returning tide, the living colour and splendour of the beautiful head, the light of eyes that seemed to reflect such utterly other things than the mean things actually before them; and, above all, the high curt consideration of a manner that even at bad moments was a magnificent habit and of the very essence of the innumerable things--her beauty, her birth, her father and mother, her cousins and all her ancestors--that its possessor couldn't have got rid of even had she wished. How did our obscure little public servant know that for the lady of the telegrams this was a bad moment? How

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 Baby Mine by Margaret Mayo:

"Don't try anything like that," warned Aggie; "you can't get out of this house without that baby. The mother is down stairs now. She's guarding the door. I saw her." And Aggie sailed triumphantly out of the room to make the proposed exchange of babies.

Before Jimmy was able to suggest to himself an escape from Aggie's last plan of action, the telephone again began to cry for attention.

Neither Jimmy nor Zoie could summon courage to approach the impatient instrument, and as usual Zoie cried frantically for Aggie.