Today's Stichomancy for George Armstrong Custer

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

sweater, cap, leggings and mittens. Go on! Throw them at me!"

But I didn't. I looked at them, all white and soft, and it came over me suddenly how kind people had been lately, and how much I'd been getting--the old doctor's waistcoat buttons and Miss Pat's furs, and now this! I just buried my face in them and cried.

Doctor Barnes stood by and said nothing. Some men wouldn't have understood, but he did. After a minute or so he came over and pulled the sweater out from the bundle.

"I'm glad you like 'em," he said, "but as I bought them at Hubbard's, in Finleyville, and as the old liar guaranteed they

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Crisis in Russia by Arthur Ransome:

without anesthetics I record the case of an acquaintance, a Bolshevik, working in a Government office, who suffered last summer from a slight derangement of the stomach due to improper and inadequate feeding. His doctor prescribed a medicine, and nearly a dozen different apothecaries were unable to make up the prescription for lack of one or several of the simple ingredients required. Soap has become an article so rare (in Russia as in Germany during the blockade and the war there is a terrible absence of fats) that for the present it is to be treated as a means of safeguarding labor, to be given to the workmen for washing

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Charmides and Other Poems by Oscar Wilde:

Past sombre homestead and wet orchard-close, And came at last unto a little quay, And called his mates aboard, and took his seat On the high poop, and pushed from land, and loosed the dripping sheet,

And steered across the bay, and when nine suns Passed down the long and laddered way of gold, And nine pale moons had breathed their orisons To the chaste stars their confessors, or told Their dearest secret to the downy moth That will not fly at noonday, through the foam and surging froth

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 The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare:

Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the turtle fled In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance, and no space was seen 'Twixt the turtle and his queen; But in them it were a wonder.