Today's Stichomancy for Kirk Douglas

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Helen of Troy And Other Poems by Sara Teasdale:

I have no care what place the grains may fall, Nor of my songs, if Time shall blow them back, As land-wind breaks the lines of dying foam Along the bright wet beaches, scattering The flakes once more against the laboring sea, Into oblivion. What care have I To please Apollo since Love hearkens not? Your words will live forever, men will say "She was the perfect lover" -- I shall die, I loved too much to live. Go Sappho, go -- I hate your hands that beat so full of life,

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner:

man drops that he would forget. A fine drizzly rain was falling, and he walked up the street with his arms folded behind him, and his head bent. The people walked up the other side; and it seemed to him he was alone. But I walked behind him."

"And then," asked Peter, seeing that the stranger was silent, "what happened to him after that?"

"That was only last Sunday," said the stranger.

There was silence again for some seconds.

Then Peter said, "Well, anyhow, at least he didn't die!"

The stranger crossed his hands upon his knees. "Peter Simon Halket," he said, "it is easier for a man to die than to stand alone. He who can stand

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain:

sometimes when she began to empty one of these sen- tences on me I unconsciously took the very attitude of reverence, and stood uncovered; and if words had been water, I had been drowned, sure. She had ex- actly the German way; whatever was in her mind to be delivered, whether a mere remark, or a sermon, or a cyclopedia, or the history of a war, she would get it into a single sentence or die. Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

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 When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

merry. Aunt Selina had gone to bed.

The idea, of course, was to start an embryo fire just inside the windows, in the pans, to feed it with the orange-fire powder that is used on the Fourth of July, and when we had thrown open the windows and yelled "fire" and all the guards and reporters had rushed to the front of the house, to escape quietly by a rear door from the basement kitchen, get into machines Dal had in waiting, and lose ourselves as quickly as we could.

You can see how simple it was.

We were terribly excited, of course. Every one rushed madly for motor coats and veils, and Dal shuffled the numbers so the people