| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: "Blazne!" in Bohemian. Once in the main road, she let him
out into a lope, and they soon emerged upon the crest of high land,
where they moved along the skyline, silhouetted against the band
of faint colour that lingered in the west. This horse and rider,
with their free, rhythmical gallop, were the only moving things
to be seen on the face of the flat country. They seemed, in the
last sad light of evening, not to be there accidentally, but as
an inevitable detail of the landscape.
Nils watched them until they had shrunk to a mere moving
speck against the sky, then he crossed the sand creek and climbed
the hill. When he reached the gate the front of the house was
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Voice of the City by O. Henry: doubloons to a microbe. That is, part of it goes to
the man who invents a new bacillus and the rest to es-
tablish a hospital for doing away with it again.
There are one or two trifling bequests on the side.
- the butler and the housekeeper get a seal ring and
$10 each. His nephew gets $1,000."
"You've always had plenty of money to spend,"
observed Old Bryson.
"Tons," said Gillian. "Uncle was the fairygod-
mother as far as an allowance was concerned."
"Any other heirs? " asked Old Bryson.
The Voice of the City |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: dusty jolting railway, and the horrid fusty office with its endless
disappointments, they are well gone. It is well enough to fight
and scheme and bustle about in the eager crowd here [in London] for
a while now and then, but not for a lifetime. What I have now is
just perfect. Study for winter, action for summer, lovely country
for recreation, a pleasant town for talk . . .'
CHAPTER V. - NOTES OF TELEGRAPH VOYAGES, 1858 TO 1873.
BUT it is now time to see Jenkin at his life's work. I have before
me certain imperfect series of letters written, as he says, 'at
hazard, for one does not know at the time what is important and
what is not': the earlier addressed to Miss Austin, after the
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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 Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger: there such small attendance at the regular Socialistic meetings, while
the meetings of this character were packed to suffocation? It did not
apparently penetrate the leaders' heads that the reason was a simple
one. Those meetings were evidently of no interest to them, while
those which dealt with the limitation of offspring were of personal,
vital, present interest....What particularly amused me--and pained me-
-in the anti-limitationists was the ease and equanimity with which
they advised the poor women to keep on bearing children. The woman
herself was not taken into consideration, as if she was not a human
being, but a machine. What are her sufferings, her labor pains, her
inability to read, to attend meetings, to have a taste of life? What
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