| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Stories From the Old Attic by Robert Harris: After a moment or two of reflective silence, the mayor made bold to
speak (seeing the constable in a reverie), and asked gently and
softly, "Where did you get all these, uh, items?"
"Why, looking for gold and treasure, sonny," the old man answered,
in a tone that implied that the mayor should have known the answer
already. "But," he added as a second thought, and in the face of
these gentlemen's now rather extravagantly and injudiciously raised
eyebrows and opened mouths, "they were all just what I was looking
for--like the broken arm here. Quite a find, eh?"
At this point, the farmer, who had been standing generally in the
background holding his hat in both hands, came forward and begged an
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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 The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: Who could have helped laughing to hear them assert and prove, by
reasons evidently their own, that the King of France alone imposed the
taxes, that the Chambers were convoked to destroy the clergy, that
thirteen hundred thousand persons had perished on the scaffold during
the Revolution? They frequently discussed the press, without either of
them having the faintest idea of what that modern engine really was.
Monsieur Birotteau listened with acceptance to Mademoiselle Gamard
when she told him that a man who ate an egg every morning would die in
a year, and that facts proved it; that a roll of light bread eaten
without drinking for several days together would cure sciatica; that
all the workmen who assisted in pulling down the Abbey Saint-Martin
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