| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg by Mark Twain: --now look pleasant, please," but not even this capital joke could
surprise the dreary faces into any softening.
So three weeks passed--one week was left. It was Saturday evening
after supper. Instead of the aforetime Saturday-evening flutter and
bustle and shopping and larking, the streets were empty and
desolate. Richards and his old wife sat apart in their little
parlour--miserable and thinking. This was become their evening
habit now: the life-long habit which had preceded it, of reading,
knitting, and contented chat, or receiving or paying neighbourly
calls, was dead and gone and forgotten, ages ago--two or three weeks
ago; nobody talked now, nobody read, nobody visited--the whole
The Man that Corrupted Hadleyburg |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton by Edith Wharton: this particular connection that she presently recalled a certain
soft afternoon of the previous October, when, passing from the
first rapturous flurry of exploration to a detailed inspection of
the old house, she had pressed (like a novel heroine) a panel
that opened at her touch, on a narrow flight of stairs leading to
an unsuspected flat ledge of the roof--the roof which, from
below, seemed to slope away on all sides too abruptly for any but
practised feet to scale.
The view from this hidden coign was enchanting, and she had flown
down to snatch Ned from his papers and give him the freedom of
her discovery. She remembered still how, standing on the narrow
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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 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley: living thing. I have devoted my creator, the select specimen of
all that is worthy of love and admiration among men, to misery;
I have pursued him even to that irremediable ruin.
There he lies, white and cold in death. You hate me, but your
abhorrence cannot equal that with which I regard myself.
I look on the hands which executed the deed; I think on the heart
in which the imagination of it was conceived and long for the
moment when these hands will meet my eyes, when that imagination
will haunt my thoughts no more.
"Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief.
My work is nearly complete. Neither yours nor any man's death
Frankenstein |
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 Glinda of Oz by L. Frank Baum: and get us."
But the Skeezers didn't need boats, as the girls soon
discovered. For on a sudden an opening appeared at the
base of the palace and from the opening came a slender
shaft of steel, reaching out slowly but steadily across
the water in the direction of the place where they
stood. To the girls this steel arrangement looked like
a triangle, with the base nearest the water. It came
toward them in the form of an arch, stretching out from
the palace wall until its end reached the bank and
rested there, while the other end still remained on the
Glinda of Oz |
