Today's Stichomancy for Anonymous

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson:

two crop ears to have a shoot at either of us? Saint Michael, man! they hate us like two polecats!"

"Well, sooth it is, they hate Sir Daniel," answered Hatch, a little sobered.

"Ay, they hate Sir Daniel, and they hate every man that serves with him," said Appleyard; "and in the first order of hating, they hate Bennet Hatch and old Nicholas the bowman. See ye here: if there was a stout fellow yonder in the wood-edge, and you and I stood fair for him - as, by Saint George, we stand! - which, think ye, would he choose?"

"You, for a good wager," answered Hatch.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken:

XIII.

The half-shut doors through which we heard that music Are softly closed. Horns mutter down to silence. The stars whirl out, the night grows deep. Darkness settles upon us. A vague refrain Drowsily teases at the drowsy brain. In numberless rooms we stretch ourselves and sleep.

Where have we been? What savage chaos of music Whirls in our dreams?--We suddenly rise in darkness, Open our eyes, cry out, and sleep once more. We dream we are numberless sea-waves languidly foaming

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mad King by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

through Barney Custer's athletic frame.

The man cast a glance to his right. His machine drove from the left side, and he could not see the road at all over the right hand door. The sight of tree tops waving beneath him was all that was visible. Just ahead the road's edge rushed swiftly beneath the right-hand fender, the wheels on that side must have been on the very verge of the em- bankment.

Now he was abreast the girl. Just ahead he could see where the road disappeared around a corner of the bluff at the dangerous curve the girl had warned him against.

The Mad King

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 Pierre Grassou by Honore de Balzac:

to be a virtuous bourgeois, having left his native place and come to Paris to be clerk with a color-merchant (formerly of Mayenne and a distant connection of the Orgemonts) made himself a painter simply by the fact of an obstinacy which constitutes the Breton character. What he suffered, the manner in which he lived during those years of study, God only knows. He suffered as much as great men suffer when they are hounded by poverty and hunted like wild beasts by the pack of commonplace minds and by troops of vanities athirst for vengeance.

As soon as he thought himself able to fly on his own wings, Fougeres took a studio in the upper part of the rue des Martyrs, where he began to delve his way. He made his first appearance in 1819. The first