Today's Stichomancy for Toni Braxton

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Case of the Golden Bullet by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner:

on the servant's arm and halted a moment. "Where was it that she threw herself out?"

"From the last window upstairs there."

"And did it kill her at once?"

"Yes. Anyway she was unconscious when we came down."

"Was the master at home?"

"Why, yes, it happened in the middle of the night."

"She had a fever, didn't she? Had she been ill long?"

"No. She was in bed that day, but we thought it was nothing of importance."

"These fevers come on quickly sometimes," remarked the old man

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Foolish Virgin by Thomas Dixon:

"I'm only twenty-four."

"In these five years I've met a hundred men my equal."

"And smashed the conventions of Society whenever you saw fit."

"Without breaking a single law of reason or common- sense. In the meantime I've met two men who have really made love to me. I thought I loved one of them--until I met the other. The second proved himself to be an unprincipled scoundrel. If I had held your views of life and hated my work, I would have married

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Aesop's Fables by Aesop:

at the foot of a tree in his garden; but every week he used to go and dig it up and gloat over his gains. A robber, who had noticed this, went and dug up the gold and decamped with it. When the Miser next came to gloat over his treasures, he found nothing but the empty hole. He tore his hair, and raised such an outcry that all the neighbours came around him, and he told them how he used to come and visit his gold. "Did you ever take any of it out?" asked one of them.

"Nay," said he, "I only came to look at it."

"Then come again and look at the hole," said a neighbour; "it will do you just as much good."

Aesop's Fables

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 Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain:

follow this rule. [An examination of the twins' hands was begun at once.] You have often heard of twins who were so exactly alike that when dressed alike their own parents could not tell them apart. Yet there was never a twin born in to this world that did not carry from birth to death a sure identifier in this mysterious and marvelous natal autograph. That once known to you, his fellow twin could never personate him and deceive you."

Wilson stopped and stood silent. Inattention dies a quick and sure death when a speaker does that. The stillness gives warning that something is coming. All palms and finger balls went down now, all slouching forms straightened, all heads came up,