Today's Stichomancy for George S. Patton
| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Glasses by Henry James: "Doesn't she care for that?"
"Just enough, as you saw, to hug me till I cry out. She's too
pleased with herself for anything else to matter."
"Surely, my dear friend," I rejoined, "she has a good deal to be
pleased with!"
"So every one tells her, and so you would have told her if I had
given you the chance. However, that doesn't signify either, for
her vanity is beyond all making or mending. She believes in
herself, and she's welcome, after all, poor dear, having only
herself to look to. I've seldom met a young woman more completely
free to be silly. She has a clear course--she'll make a showy
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Silverado Squatters by Robert Louis Stevenson: into the bar, leaving them under a tree on the other side of
the road. I had to devote myself. I stood under the shadow
of that tree for, I suppose, hard upon an hour, and had not
the heart to be angry. Once some one remembered me, and
brought me out half a tumblerful of the playful, innocuous
American cocktail. I drank it, and lo! veins of living fire
ran down my leg; and then a focus of conflagration remained
seated in my stomach, not unpleasantly, for quarter of an
hour. I love these sweet, fiery pangs, but I will not court
them. The bulk of the time I spent in repeating as much
French poetry as I could remember to the horses, who seemed
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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 The Altar of the Dead by Henry James: replaced. The frivolity, the indecency of it made Stransom's eyes
fill; and he had that evening a sturdy sense that he alone, in a
world without delicacy, had a right to hold up his head. While he
smoked, after dinner, he had a book in his lap, but he had no eyes
for his page: his eyes, in the swarming void of things, seemed to
have caught Kate Creston's, and it was into their sad silences he
looked. It was to him her sentient spirit had turned, knowing it
to be of her he would think. He thought for a long time of how the
closed eyes of dead women could still live - how they could open
again, in a quiet lamplit room, long after they had looked their
last. They had looks that survived - had them as great poets had
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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 Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: respectability to such meetings, when held for religious purposes;
and other collateral equivocations, such as the vulgar English one
of using the word "Priest" as a contraction for "presbyter."
Now, in order to deal with words rightly, this is the habit you must
form. Nearly every word in your language has been first a word of
some other language--of Saxon, German, French, Latin, or Greek; (not
to speak of eastern and primitive dialects). And many words have
been all these--that is to say, have been Greek first, Latin next,
French or German next, and English last: undergoing a certain
change of sense and use on the lips of each nation; but retaining a
deep vital meaning, which all good scholars feel in employing them,
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