Today's Stichomancy for H. G. Wells

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Poor and Proud by Oliver Optic:

the two four-pence, and the four coppers, for there was something unmercantile about the manner in which it had come into her possession. She could not feel satisfied with herself, as she walked towards home, till she had argued the matter, and effected a compromise between her pride and her poverty. She had sold candy for the money, and the gentleman had paid her over three cents a stick--rather above the market value of the article; but there was no other way to make the transaction correspond with her ideas of propriety.

Her work was done for the forenoon, though she had plenty of candy at home. It was now eleven o'clock, and she had not time to

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald:

Q.Very afraid? A.Just passively afraid. Q.Where are you drifting? A.Don't ask me! Q.Don't you care? A.Rather. I don't want to commit moral suicide. Q.Have you no interests left? A.None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness. Q.An interesting idea.

This Side of Paradise

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Men of Iron by Howard Pyle:

fell. Till then, as thou art an honest man, trouble her not. Now get thee gone.

As Myles crossed the dark and silent courtyards, and looked up at the clear, still twinkle of the stars, he felt a kind of dull wonder that they and the night and the world should seem so much the same, and he be so different.

The first stroke had been given that was to break in pieces his boyhood life--the second was soon to follow.

CHAPTER 21

There are now and then times in the life of every one when new and strange things occur with such rapidity that one has hardly

Men of Iron

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 Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson:

At that Kalamake turned, and if he had run before, now he flew. But fast as he ran, the leaves burned faster. The flame was ready to expire when, with a great leap, he bounded on the mat. The wind of his leaping blew it out; and with that the beach was gone, and the sun and the sea, and they stood once more in the dimness of the shuttered parlour, and were once more shaken and blinded; and on the mat betwixt them lay a pile of shining dollars. Keola ran to the shutters; and there was the steamer tossing in the swell close in.

The same night Kalamake took his son-in-law apart, and gave him five dollars in his hand.