| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tattine by Ruth Ogden [Mrs. Charles W. Ide]: looked down to see Doctor--oh, could she believe her two blue eyes!--with a
dear little rabbit clinched firmly between his teeth, and his mother (think of
it, his mother!) actually standing proudly by and wildly waving her tail from
side to side, in the most delighted manner possible. As for Tattine, she
simply gave one horrified little scream and was down from the tree in a flash,
while the scream fortunately brought Maggie hurrying from the house, and as
Maggie was Doctor's confidential friend (owing to certain choice little
morsels, dispensed from the butler's pantry window with great regularity three
times a day), he at once, at her command, relaxed his hold on the little
jack-rabbit. The poor little thing was still breathing, breathing indeed with
all his might and main, so that his heart thumped against his little brown
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Mother by Owen Wister: reach the bottom, and were drawn off through another sluice, and so on.
This saved the wages of the egg twirlers, whose method of candling eggs,
as it was called, was far less rapid than the Separator. And when I
learned that one house in St. Louis alone twirled 50,000 eggs in a day,
the possible profits of the Egg Trust became clear to me. But they were
not so clear to Ethel. She said that you could not monopolise hens. That
they would always be laying eggs and putting it in the power of
competitors to hatch them by incubators. Nor did she have confidence in
the Pasteurised Feeder. 'Even if you get the parents to adopt it,' she
said, 'you cannot get the children. If they do not like the taste of the
milk as it comes out of the bottle through the Feeder, they will simply
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: an engraving of Hero and Leander, and I said to myself, If the
ancients used all that oil on their heads they had some reason for it;
for the ancients are the ancients, in spite of all the moderns may
say; I stand by Boileau about the ancients. I took my departure from
that point and got the oil of nuts, thanks to your relation, little
Bianchon the medical student; he told me that at school his comrades
used nut oil to promote the growth of their whiskers and mustachios.
All we need is the approval of Monsieur Vauquelin; enlightened by his
science, we shall mislead the public. I was in the markets just now,
talking to a seller of nuts, so as to get hold of the raw material,
and now I am about to meet one of the greatest scientific men in
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
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 From the Earth to the Moon by Jules Verne: requested permission to return with him to their native country.
"Singular hallucination!" said he to Barbicane, after having
dismissed the deputation with promises to convey numbers of
messages to friends in the moon. "Do you believe in the
influence of the moon upon distempers?"
"Scarcely!"
"No more do I, despite some remarkable recorded facts of history.
For instance, during an epidemic in 1693, a large number of
persons died at the very moment of an eclipse. The celebrated
Bacon always fainted during an eclipse. Charles VI relapsed
six times into madness during the year 1399, sometimes during
From the Earth to the Moon |
