Today's Stichomancy for Theodore Roosevelt

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Pool in the Desert by Sara Jeanette Duncan:

even something of the Colonel's wife, authority, incisiveness. 'Why didn't you tell me? Ah--I see.'

I stood before her abashed, and that was ridiculous, while she measured me as if I presented in myself the woman I took her to be. 'It wasn't like that,' she said. I had to defend myself. 'Judy,' I said, 'if you weren't in honour bound to Anna, how could I know that you would be in honour bound to the regiment? There was a train at three.'

'I beg to assure you that you have overcalculated,' said Mrs. Harbottle. Her eyes were hard and proud. 'And I am not sure'--a deep red swept over her face, a man's blush--'in the light of this I

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Heap O' Livin' by Edgar A. Guest:

And bearing it all for the love of them.

Only a dad but he gives his all, To smooth the way for his children small, Doing with courage stern and grim The deeds that his father did for him. This is the line that for him I pen: Only a dad, but the best of men.

HARD KNOCKS

I'm not the man to say that failure's sweet, Nor tell a chap to laugh when things go wrong;

A Heap O' Livin'

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Faith of Men by Jack London:

face of one of his own kind, the cheery word, the sympathy of comradeship shared with misfortune--these things meant much; and the winter was yet young when he began to realize the added reasons, with such an assistant, that the previous agent had found to impel his own hand against his life.

It was very lonely at Twenty Mile. The bleak vastness stretched away on every side to the horizon. The snow, which was really frost, flung its mantle over the land and buried everything in the silence of death. For days it was clear and cold, the thermometer steadily recording forty to fifty degrees below zero. Then a change came over the face of things. What little moisture had

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 On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin:

points in which species differ from other species of the same genus, are called specific characters; and as these specific characters have varied and come to differ within the period of the branching off of the species from a common progenitor, it is probable that they should still often be in some degree variable,--at least more variable than those parts of the organisation which have for a very long period remained constant.

In connexion with the present subject, I will make only two other remarks. I think it will be admitted, without my entering on details, that secondary sexual characters are very variable; I think it also will be admitted that species of the same group differ from each other more widely in their secondary sexual characters, than in other parts of their organisation;

On the Origin of Species