| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Emma McChesney & Co. by Edna Ferber: "You may as well get used to it," smiled Emma, "because I'm
known to every train-conductor, porter, hotel-clerk,
chamber-maid, and bell-boy between here and the Great Lakes."
It was Sam who proved himself hero of the honeymoon, for he saved
T. A. Buck from continuing his journey to Chicago brideless.
Fifteen minutes earlier, Buck had gone to the buffet-car for a
smoke. At Cleveland, Emma, looking out of the car window, saw a
familiar figure pacing up and down the station platform. It was
that dapper and important little Irishman, O'Malley, buyer for
Gage & Fosdick, the greatest mail-order house in the
world--O'Malley, whose letter T. A. Buck had answered; O'Malley,
Emma McChesney & Co. |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne: open space on the hill-side was a solitude, set in a vast gloom
of forest. Beyond that darksome verge, the firelight glimmered on
the stately trunks and almost black foliage of pines, intermixed
with the lighter verdure of sapling oaks, maples, and poplars,
while here and there lay the gigantic corpses of dead trees,
decaying on the leaf-strewn soil. And it seemed to little Joe --a
timorous and imaginative child--that the silent forest was
holding its breath until some fearful thing should happen.
Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door
of the kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner
and his son, he bade, rather than advised, them to retire to
The Snow Image |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: and in fact were, incapable of Chemistry, Geognosy, Comparative Anatomy,
or any of that noble choir of sister sciences, which are now building up
the material as well as the intellectual glory of Britain.
To Astronomy, on the other hand, the pupils of Euclid turned naturally,
as to the science which required the greatest amount of their favourite
geometry: but even that they were content to let pass from its
inductive to its deductive stage--not as we have done now, after two
centuries of inductive search for the true laws, and their final
discovery by Kepler and Newton: but as soon as Hipparchus had
propounded any theory which would do instead of the true laws, content
there to stop their experiments, and return to their favourite work 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 The Case of the Registered Letter by Grace Isabel Colbron and Augusta Groner: for his guilt, but I cannot believe it - I cannot. He says he is
innocent in spite of everything. I believe him. I brought him up,
sir; I was like his own mother to him. He never knew any other
mother. He never lied to me, not once, when he was a little boy,
and I don't believe he'd lie to me now, now that he's a man of
forty-five. He says he did not kill John Siders. Oh, I know, even
without his saying it, that he would not do such a thing."
"Can you tell us anything more about the murder itself?" questioned
Muller gently. "Is there any possibility of suicide? Or was there
a robbery?"
"They say it was no suicide, sir, and that there was a large sum of
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