Today's Stichomancy for Jack Kevorkian

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter:

small stuffy fusty room, with boards, and rafters, and cobwebs, and lath and plaster.

Opposite to him--as far away as he could sit--was an enormous rat.

"What do you mean by tumbling into my bed all covered with smuts?" said the rat, chattering his teeth.

"Please, sir, the chimney wants sweeping," said poor Tom Kitten.

"Anna Maria! Anna Maria!"

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tanglewood Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

heretofore been a great inconvenience to these poor animals, that, whenever they wished to eat a mouthful of grass, the fire out of their nostrils had shriveled it up, before they could manage to crop it. How they contrived to keep themselves alive is more than I can imagine. But now, instead of emitting jets of flame and streams of sulphurous vapor, they breathed the very sweetest of cow breath.

After kindly patting the bulls, Jason followed Medea's guidance into the Grove of Mars, where the great oak trees, that had been growing for centuries, threw so thick a shade that the moonbeams struggled vainly to find their way through it. Only

Tanglewood Tales

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells:

turn and suddenly stood up--he was holding the front wheel between his knees. "I wish," said he, with a catch in his voice, "I wish you'd leave off staring at me."

Then with the air of one who has delivered an ultimatum, he began replacing the screw hammer in the wallet.

The heath-keeper never moved. Possibly he raised his eyebrows, and certainly he stared harder than he did before. "You're pretty unsociable," he said slowly, as Mr. Hoopdriver seized the handles and stood ready to mount as soon as the cart had passed.

The indignation gathered slowly but surely. "Why don't you ride on a private road of your own if no one ain't to speak to you?"

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 Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

calling attention to their presence. The other vagabond fumbled with his hypodermic needle and the narcotic which would quickly give his fluttering nerves the quiet they craved.

Bridge, the boy, and the girl shivered together in their soggy clothing upon the edge of the bed, feeling now in the cold dawn the chill discomfort of which the excite- ment of the earlier hours of the night had rendered them unconscious. The youth coughed.

"You've caught cold," said Bridge, his tone almost self- reproachful, as though he were entirely responsible for

The Oakdale Affair