| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Red Seal by Natalie Sumner Lincoln: "And if I had?"
"Did you?" Kent was doggedly persistent, and Helen's fingers closed
around her handbag with convulsive force. Why had she not sent
Barbara to see Kent in her place?
"Did I what?" she parried.
"Did you recognize and talk with Jimmie Turnbull in your house?"
"I talked with him, yes," she admitted, and her voice dropped almost
to a whisper.
"As Jimmie Turnbull or Smith the burglar?"
"As Jimmie" - she confessed, after a slight pause.
"Then why did you go through the farce of having Jimmie arrested as
The Red Seal |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Young Forester by Zane Grey: and I began to have a sort of pride in my achievement.
"If that fellow had known how I can throw a baseball he'd have been
careful," I thought, a little cockily.
I went down-stairs into the office. The sleepy porter was mopping the
floor. Behind the desk stood a man so large that he made Buell seem small.
He was all shoulders and beard.
"Can I get breakfast?"
"Nobody's got a half-hitch on you, has they?" he replied, jerking a
monstrous thumb over his shoulder toward a door.
I knew the words half-hitch had something to do with a lasso, and I was
rather taken back by the hotel proprietor's remark. The dining-room was
The Young Forester |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Wrecker by Stevenson & Osbourne: mind, was not too dearly purchased at the risk of sunstroke or
sand-blindness; and soon I was alone on the ill-omened islet. I
should find it hard to tell of what I thought--of Jim, of Mamie,
of our lost fortune, of my lost hopes, of the doom before me: to
turn to at some mechanical occupation in some subaltern rank,
and to toil there, unremarked and unamused, until the hour of
the last deliverance. I was, at least, so sunk in sadness that I
scarce remarked where I was going; and chance (or some finer
sense that lives in us, and only guides us when the mind is in
abeyance) conducted my steps into a quarter of the island
where the birds were few. By some devious route, which I was
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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 Psychology of Revolution by Gustave le Bon: gravity will be about 32 feet during the first second, 64 feet
during the next, 96 feet during the next, &c. It would be easy,
were the moving body allowed to fall from a sufficient height, to
give it a velocity sufficient to perforate a plate of steel.
But although this explanation is applicable to the acceleration
of a sentiment subjected to a constant exciting cause, it
does not tell us why the effects of acceleration finally and
suddenly cease. Such a fall is only comprehensible if we bring
in physiological factors--that is, if we remember that pleasure,
like pain, cannot exceed certain limits, and that all sensations,
when too violent, result in the paralysis of sensation. Our
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