| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer Abroad by Mark Twain: We've come close on to eight hundred miles."
I didn't believe it, but it made the cold streaks
trickle down my back just the same. In my experi-
ence I knowed it wouldn't take much short of two
weeks to do it down the Mississippi on a raft.
Jim was working his mind and studying. Pretty
soon he says:
"Mars Tom, did you say dem clocks uz right?"
"Yes, they're right."
"Ain't yo' watch right, too?"
"She's right for St. Louis, but she's an hour wrong
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: But Mr. Hillard, besides being an author and a critic, cared little for
the too literary cleverness of Mr. Graves. He therefore heavily crushed
that gentleman's allusion to Wagner's opera. "I remember," he said, "the
singing contest between Beckmesser and Walter, and I doubt if we are to
be afflicted with anything so dull in this house."
Richard had settled himself in the easy-chair, and was looking
thoughtfully at various objects in the room, while the small-talk was
subsiding around him.
"Why, Mr. Field," said Mrs. Davenport, "you look as if you could find
nothing to suggest your story to you."
"On the contrary," said Richard, "it is the number of things that suggest
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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 Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: lay down to rest, are favourable to the growth of disordered
fancies, and uneasy visions. He knew this, even in the horror with
which he started from his first sleep, and threw up the window to
dispel it by the presence of some object, beyond the room, which
had not been, as it were, the witness of his dream. But it was not
a new terror of the night; it had been present to him before, in
many shapes; it had haunted him in bygone times, and visited his
pillow again and again. If it had been but an ugly object, a
childish spectre, haunting his sleep, its return, in its old form,
might have awakened a momentary sensation of fear, which, almost in
the act of waking, would have passed away. This disquiet,
Barnaby Rudge |
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 Death of the Lion by Henry James: has just published a work in which amiable people who are not
initiated have been pained to see the genius of a sister-novelist
held up to unmistakeable ridicule; so fresh an exhibition does it
seem to them of the dreadful way men have always treated women.
Dora Forbes, it's true, at the present hour, is immensely pushed by
Mrs. Wimbush and has sat for his portrait to the young artists she
protects, sat for it not only in oils but in monumental alabaster.
What happened at Prestidge later in the day is of course
contemporary history. If the interruption I had whimsically
sanctioned was almost a scandal, what is to be said of that general
scatter of the company which, under the Doctor's rule, began to
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