| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Whirligigs by O. Henry: Later on, they offered the Garveys an enormous quantity
of ready, green, crisp money for their thirty-acre patch
of cleared land, mentioning, as an excuse for such a mad
action, some irrelevant and inadequate nonsense about
a bed of mica underlying the said property.
When the Garveys became possessed of so many dol-
lars that they faltered in computing them, the deficiencies
of life on Blackjack began to grow prominent. Pike
began to talk of new shoes, a hogshead of tobacco to
set in the corner, a new lock to his rifle; and, leading
Martella to a certain spot on the mountain-side, he
|
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 Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad: bag, an umbrella, with an impassive face. The time had come for
the expenditure of the sum of three-and-sixpence on what might well
be supposed the last cab drive of Mrs Verloc's mother's life. They
went out at the shop door.
The conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb
that "truth can be more cruel than caricature," if such a proverb
existed. Crawling behind an infirm horse, a metropolitan hackney
carriage drew up on wobbly wheels and with a maimed driver on the
box. This last peculiarity caused some embarrassment. Catching
sight of a hooked iron contrivance protruding from the left sleeve
of the man's coat, Mrs Verloc's mother lost suddenly the heroic
The Secret Agent |
