Today's Stichomancy for Henry Ford

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain:

It's no great distance to the lower, and you'll have to get along with that.'

'All right, sir. If Jones don't like it he'll have to lump it, I reckon.'

And then the mate left. My exultation began to cool and my wonder to come up. Here was a man who not only proposed to find this plantation on such a night, but to find either end of it you preferred. I dreadfully wanted to ask a question, but I was carrying about as many short answers as my cargo-room would admit of, so I held my peace. All I desired to ask Mr. Bixby was the simple question whether he was ass enough to really imagine he was going to find that plantation on

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Euthydemus by Plato:

sophistical, verbal, eristic.

It is this stage of philosophy which Plato satirises in the Euthydemus. The fallacies which are noted by him appear trifling to us now, but they were not trifling in the age before logic, in the decline of the earlier Greek philosophies, at a time when language was first beginning to perplex human thought. Besides he is caricaturing them; they probably received more subtle forms at the hands of those who seriously maintained them. They are patent to us in Plato, and we are inclined to wonder how any one could ever have been deceived by them; but we must remember also that there was a time when the human mind was only with great difficulty disentangled from such fallacies.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Man against the Sky by Edwin Arlington Robinson:

One night last week?

You tried hard? And even then Found a time to pause? When you try as hard again, You'll have another cause. When you find yourself at odds With all dreamers of all gods, You may smite yourself with rods -- But not the laws.

Though they seem to show a spite Rather devilish,

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 Criminal Sociology by Enrico Ferri:

occasional they have become, partly by their imprisonment, habitual offenders, they must be subjected to the measures already indicated for born criminals. The latter are incorrigible through congenital tendency to degenerate, and the former are incorrigible through acquired tendency; but they end in the same degree of anti-sociality and brutalisation. There is, however, this difference, that habitual offenders nearly always commit less serious crimes, such as theft, swindling, forgery, indecent assault, whilst the born criminals, though they may be petty thieves, or not very formidable swindlers, are more frequently murderers, footpads, guilty of arson, or the like. Thus the