| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Message by Honore de Balzac: dying man's last wish. Poor boy, all through his agony he was
torturing himself in his young simplicity of heart with the
thought of the painful shock to his mistress when she should
suddenly read of his death in a newspaper. He begged me to go
myself to break the news to her. He bade me look for a key which
he wore on a ribbon about his neck. I found it half buried in the
flesh, but the dying boy did not utter a sound as I extricated it
as gently as possible from the wound which it had made. He had
scarcely given me the necessary directions--I was to go to his
home at La Charite-sur-Loire for his mistress' love-letters,
which he conjured me to return to her--when he grew speechless in
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells: a little pale, but thoroughly fit."
"Yes," said the late bishop, "I'm fairly fit--"
"Only--?" said the doctor, smiling his teeth, with something of
the manner of an old bathing woman who tells a child to jump.
"Well, I'm run down and--worried."
"We'd better sit down," said the great doctor professionally,
and looked hard at him. Then he pulled at the arm of a chair.
The ex-bishop sat down, and the doctor placed himself between
his patient and the light.
"This business of resigning my bishopric and so forth has
involved very considerable strains," Scrope began. "That I think
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