| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: it would take the whole force to round up a myth mur-
derer."
"Well," said the Fool-Killer, briskly, "I must be
going. You had better go home and sleep it off.
Good-night."
At this I was moved by a sudden fear for Kerner to
a softer and more pleading mood. I leaned against
the gray man's sleeve and besought him:
"Good Mr. Fool-Killer, please don't kill little Ker-
ner. Why can't you go back South and kill Con-
gressmen and clay-caters and let us alone? Why
The Voice of the City |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: If anyone, impressed by my view that the rights of a child are
precisely those of an adult, proceeds to treat a child as if it were
an adult, he (or she) will find that though the plan will work much
better at some points than the usual plan, at others it will not work
at all; and this discovery may provoke him to turn back from the whole
conception of children's rights with a jest at the expense of
bachelors' and old maids' children. In dealing with children what is
needed is not logic but sense. There is no logical reason why young
persons should be allowed greater control of their property the day
after they are twenty-one than the day before it. There is no logical
reason why I, who strongly object to an adult standing over a boy of
|
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: no resisting him; neither indeed had I any mind to resist him
any more, let what would come of it.
Thus the government of our virtue was broken, and I
exchanged the place of friend for that unmusical, harsh-sounding
title of whore. In the morning we were both at our penitentials;
I cried very heartily, he expressed himself very sorry; but that
was all either of us could do at that time, and the way being
thus cleared, and the bars of virtue and conscience thus removed,
we had the less difficult afterwards to struggle with.
It was but a dull kind of conversation that we had together
for all the rest of that week; I looked on him with blushes, and
Moll Flanders |
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 Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte: was repairing, and making straight to the high-road. I walked as
if for a wager, mile after mile, till a turn brought me in view of
the Heights; but no Catherine could I detect, far or near. The
Crags lie about a mile and a half beyond Mr. Heathcliff's place,
and that is four from the Grange, so I began to fear night would
fall ere I could reach them. 'And what if she should have slipped
in clambering among them,' I reflected, 'and been killed, or broken
some of her bones?' My suspense was truly painful; and, at first,
it gave me delightful relief to observe, in hurrying by the
farmhouse, Charlie, the fiercest of the pointers, lying under a
window, with swelled head and bleeding ear. I opened the wicket
Wuthering Heights |
