Today's Stichomancy for Mohandas Gandhi

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The White Moll by Frank L. Packard:

help me put a little sense into their heads, if it is possible - eh? The fools!"

The man was violently excited. He half pulled Rhoda Gray down the length of the shop to the front door. Puzzled, bewildered, a little uneasy, she watched him lock the door, and then followed him across the courtyard, while he continued to mutter constantly to himself.

"Wot's de matter?" she asked him twice.

But it was not until they had reached the street, and Shluker was hurrying along as fast as he could walk, that he answered her.

"It's the Pug and Pinkie Bonn!" he jerked out angrily. "They're in the Pug's room. Pinkie went back there after telephonin'.

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

Betty uttered a half articulate cry and ran to her room. Her heart was throbbing. What could she do? She felt that if she looked once into her lover's eyes she would have no strength. How dared she allow herself to be so weak! Yet she knew this was the end. She could deceive him no longer: For she felt a stir in her heart, stronger than all, beyond all resistance, an exquisite agony, the sweet, blind, tumultuous exultation of the woman who loves and is loved.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

"Bess, what do you think?" said Col. Zane, going into the kitchen next morning, after he had returned from the pasture. "Clarke just came over and asked for Betty. I called her. She came down looking as sweet and cool as one

Betty Zane

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay:

"But what's to prevent your finding Threal? Surely it's a well-known country?"

"It lies underground. Its communications with the upper world are few, and where they are, no one that I have ever spoken to knows. I have scoured the valleys and the hills. I have been to the very gates of Lichstorm. I am old, so that your aged men would appear newborn infants beside me, but I am as far from Threal as when I was a green youth, dwelling among a throng of fellow phaens."

"Then, if my luck is good, yours is very bad.... But when you have found Faceny, what do you gain?"

Leehallfae looked at him in silence. The smile faded from aer face,

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 Virginibus Puerisque by Robert Louis Stevenson:

pleadings? How are you, the apostle of laxity, to turn suddenly about into the rabbi of precision; and after these years of ragged practice, pose for a hero to the lackey who has found you out? In this temptation to mutual indulgence lies the particular peril to morality in married life. Daily they drop a little lower from the first ideal, and for a while continue to accept these changelings with a gross complacency. At last Love wakes and looks about him; finds his hero sunk into a stout old brute, intent on brandy pawnee; finds his heroine divested of her angel brightness; and in the flash of that first disenchantment, flees for ever.