Today's Stichomancy for William Shakespeare

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Call of the Canyon by Zane Grey:

in this small pen. One was a brawny giant in undershirt and overalls that appeared filthy. He held a cloth in his hand and strode toward the nearest sheep. Folding the cloth round the neck of the sheep, he dragged it forward, with an ease which showed great strength, and threw it into a pit that yawned at the side. Souse went the sheep into a murky, muddy pool and disappeared. But suddenly its head came up and then its shoulders. And it began half to walk and half swim down what appeared to be a narrow boxlike ditch that contained other floundering sheep. Then Carley saw men on each side of this ditch bending over with poles that had crooks at the end, and their work was to press and pull the sheep along to the end of the ditch, and drive them up a boarded incline into another corral where many other

The Call of the Canyon

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson:

outpourings of a DILETTANTE.'

'But, my dear sir!' he exclaimed.

'But, my dear sir!' I echoed, 'I will allow no man to interrupt the flow of my ideas. Give me your opinion on my quatrain, or I vow we shall have a quarrel of it.'

'Certainly you are quite an original,' he said.

'Quite,' said I; 'and I believe I have my counterpart before me.'

'Well, for a choice,' says he, smiling, 'and whether for sense or poetry, give me

'"Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow: The rest is all but leather and prunello."'

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Light of Western Stars by Zane Grey:

women, an' wuss than thet, both north an' south of Agua Prieta. Mebbe the U. S. cavalry don't know it, an' the good old States; but we, you an' me an' Monty an' Nick, we know it. We know jest about what thet rebel war down there amounts to. It's guerrilla war, an' shore some harvest-time fer a lot of cheap thieves an' outcasts."

Oh, you're right, Nels. I'm not disputing that," replied Stewart. "If it wasn't for Miss Hammond and the other women, I'd rather enjoy seeing you and Monty open up on that bunch. I'm thinking I'd be glad to meet Don Carlos. But Miss Hammond! Why, Nels, such a woman as she is would never recover from the sight

The Light of Western Stars

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 Amazing Interlude by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

days. There had been no letter from Henri or from Jean. She had written them both several times, to Dunkirk, to the Savoy in London, to the little house near the Front. But no replies had come. Yet mail was going through. Mabel Andrews' letters from Boulogne came regularly.

When August went by, with no letters save Harvey's, begging her to come back, she gave up at last. In the little church on Sundays, with Jennie on one side ard Aunt Harriet on the other, she voiced small silent prayers - that the thing she feared had not happened. But she could not think of Henri as not living. He was too strong, too vital.

She did not understand herself those days. She was desperately unhappy. Sometimes she wondered if it would not be easier to know the truth, even