| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Kidnapped Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum: foremost into a snowbank, while the reindeer rushed onward with the
load of toys and carried it quickly out of sight and sound.
Such a surprising experience confused old Santa for a moment, and when
he had collected his senses he found that the wicked Daemons had
pulled him from the snowdrift and bound him tightly with many coils of
the stout rope. And then they carried the kidnapped Santa Claus away
to their mountain, where they thrust the prisoner into a secret cave
and chained him to the rocky wall so that he could not escape.
"Ha, ha!" laughed the Daemons, rubbing their hands together with cruel
glee. "What will the children do now? How they will cry and scold
and storm when they find there are no toys in their stockings and no
 A Kidnapped Santa Claus |
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 One Basket by Edna Ferber: appreciate Tessie's sarcasm. Angie Hatton was as unaware of
Tessie's existence as only a young woman could be whose family
residence was in Chippewa, Wisconsin, but who wintered in Italy,
summered in the mountains, and bought (so the town said) her very
hairpins in New York. When Angie Hatton came home from the East
the town used to stroll past on Mondays to view the washing on
the Hatton line. Angie's underwear, flirting so audaciously with
the sunshine and zephyrs, was of silk and crepe de Chine and
satin--materials that we had always thought of heretofore as
intended exclusively for party dresses and wedding gowns. Of
course, two years later they were showing practically the same
 One Basket |