| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs: that doors and windows were properly secured for the
night. A French window and its screen opening upon
the verandah from the library she found open. "The
house will be full of mosquitoes!" she ejaculated men-
tally as she closed them both with a bang and made them
fast. "I should just like to know who left them open.
Upon my word, I don't know what would become of
this place if it wasn't for me. Of all the shiftlessness!"
and she turned and flounced upstairs. In Abigail's room
she flashed on the center dome light from force of habit,
although she knew that the room had been left in proper
The Oakdale Affair |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft: like that we had seen the morning before on first approaching
those mountains of madness. We must have had some such normal
notions to fall back upon as our eyes swept that limitless, tempest-scarred
plateau and grasped the almost endless labyrinth of colossal,
regular, and geometrically eurythmic stone masses which reared
their crumbled and pitted crests above a glacial sheet not more
than forty or fifty feet deep at its thickest, and in places obviously
thinner.
The effect of the monstrous sight was indescribable,
for some fiendish violation of known natural law seemed certain
at the outset. Here, on a hellishly ancient table-land fully twenty
At the Mountains of Madness |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: until they had left the house. He always sat far back near the
door, so that he could see them come out. Then he would overtake
Pop with Patsy, whenever the little fellow could go. This was not
often, for now there were many days when the boy had to lie all
day on the lounge in the sitting-room, poring over his books or
playing with Stumpy, brought into the kitchen to amuse him.
Since the day of Tom's warning look, Carl rarely joined her
daughter. Jennie would loiter by the way, speaking to the girls,
but he would hang back. He felt that Tom did not want them
together.
One spring morning, however, a new complication arose. It was a
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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 King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: which found its way through a hole in the shutter, they could see in
the midst of it an enormous foam globe, spinning round and bobbing
up and down like a cork, on which, as on a most luxurious cushion,
reclined the little old gentleman, cap and all. There was plenty of
room for it now, for the roof was off.
"Sorry to incommode you," said their visitor ironically.
"I'm afraid your beds are dampish. Perhaps you had better go
to your brother's room; I've left the ceiling on there."
They required no second admonition, but rushed into Gluck's
room, wet through and in an agony of terror.
"You'll find my card on the kitchen table," the old gentleman
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