Today's Stichomancy for Samuel L. Jackson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy:

intellectual satisfaction, he had frequented the public library, sometimes being there when he was truant from school, and staying there in the evening when his mother supposed he was out in a street gang. In regard to his selection of reading: he had perused novels and books on adventure, but ``I wanted to read something that tells something so that when I got through I would know something.'' He copied plans and directions, and with a hatchet, hammer and saw attempted at home to make little things, some of which were said to have been broken up by the parents. The boy had much in mind the career of great men who had succeeded from small beginnings, and he spoke often of Benjamin

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler:

when you ought only to have tittered.

JONATHAN

Gor! I--what does one go to see fun for if they can't laugh?

JESSAMY You may laugh; but you must laugh by rule.

JONATHAN

Swamp it--laugh by rule! Well, I should like that tarnally.

JESSAMY

Why, you know, Mr. Jonathan, that to dance, a

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain:

good side of, for they've tried to please him by hiring his no-account brother to help on the farm when they can't hardly afford it, and don't want him around anyhow. Who are the Dunlaps?"

"They live about a mile from Uncle Silas's place, Aunt Polly--all the farmers live about a mile apart down there--and Brace Dunlap is a long sight richer than any of the others, and owns a whole grist of niggers. He's a widower, thirty-six years old, without any children, and is proud of his money and overbearing, and everybody is a little afraid of him. I judge he thought he could

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 Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy:

purity.

Kasatsky belonged to those men of the eighteen-forties (they are now no longer to be found) who while deliberately and without any conscientious scruples condoning impurity in themselves, required ideal and angelic purity in their women, regarded all unmarried women of their circle as possessed of such purity, and treated them accordingly. There was much that was false and harmful in this outlook, as concerning the laxity the men permitted themselves, but in regard to the women that old-fashioned view (sharply differing from that held by young people to-day who see in every girl merely a female seeking a mate) was, I think, of