| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Philosophy 4 by Owen Wister: thinking of Bertie and Billy, conscious of virtue, and smiling his
smile. They were not conscious of any virtue, were Bertie and Billy,
nor were they smiling. They were solemnly eating up together a box of
handsome strawberries and sucking the juice from their reddened thumbs.
"Rather mean not to make him wait and have some of these after his hard
work on us," said Bertie. "I'd forgotten about them--"
"He ran out before you could remember, anyway," said Billy.
"Wasn't he absurd about his old notes? "Bertie went on, a new
strawberry in his mouth. "We don't need them, though. With to-morrow
we'll get this course down cold."
"Yes, to-morrow," sighed Billy. "It's awful to think of another day of
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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 Adieu by Honore de Balzac: what he judged necessary for his own welfare. Their misery was even
grotesque. Faces, discolored by cold, were covered with a layer of
mud, on which tears had made a furrow from the eyes to the beard,
showing the thickness of that miry mask. The filth of their long
beards made these men still more repulsive. Some were wrapped in the
countess's shawls, others wore the trappings of horses and muddy
saddlecloths, or masses of rags from which the hoar-frost hung; some
had a boot on one leg and a shoe on the other; in fact, there were
none whose costume did not present some laughable singularity. But in
presence of such amusing sights the men themselves were grave and
gloomy. The silence was broken only by the snapping of the wood, the
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