Today's Stichomancy for Ricky Martin

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson:

they be used! The brutal mob, the savage passions . . . . Somerset, for God's sake, a public-house!'

Somerset considered him with freshly awakened curiosity. 'This is very interesting,' said he. 'You recoil from such a death?'

'Who would not?' asked the plotter.

'And to be blown up by dynamite,' inquired the young man, 'doubtless strikes you as a form of euthanasia?'

'Pardon me,' returned Zero: 'I own, and since I have braved it daily in my professional career, I own it even with pride: it is a death unusually distasteful to the mind of man.'

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville:

United States. It is not then to the written, but to the spoken language that attention must be paid, if we would detect the modifications which the idiom of an aristocratic people may undergo when it becomes the language of a democracy.

Englishmen of education, and more competent judges than I can be myself of the nicer shades of expression, have frequently assured me that the language of the educated classes in the United States is notably different from that of the educated classes in Great Britain. They complain not only that the Americans have brought into use a number of new words - the difference and the distance between the two countries might

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Pupil by Henry James:

out. She did like me awfully, and she stayed two years. She told me all about it - that at last she could never get her wages. As soon as they saw how much she liked me they stopped giving her anything. They thought she'd stay for nothing - just BECAUSE, don't you know?" And Morgan had a queer little conscious lucid look. "She did stay ever so long - as long an she could. She was only a poor girl. She used to send money to her mother. At last she couldn't afford it any longer, and went away in a fearful rage one night - I mean of course in a rage against THEM. She cried over me tremendously, she hugged me nearly to death. She told me all about it," the boy repeated. "She told me it was their idea.

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 Several Works by Edgar Allan Poe:

at length from the whole company a buzz, or murmur, expressive of disapprobation and surprise--then, finally, of terror, of horror, and of disgust.

In an assembly of phantasms such as I have painted, it may well be supposed that no ordinary appearance could have excited such sensation. In truth the masquerade licence of the night was nearly unlimited; but the figure in question had out-Heroded Herod, and gone beyond the bounds of even the prince's indefinite decorum. There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can