| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Across The Plains by Robert Louis Stevenson: THE EMIGRANT TRAIN
All this while I had been travelling by mixed trains, where I might
meet with Dutch widows and little German gentry fresh from table.
I had been but a latent emigrant; now I was to be branded once
more, and put apart with my fellows. It was about two in the
afternoon of Friday that I found myself in front of the Emigrant
House, with more than a hundred others, to be sorted and boxed for
the journey. A white-haired official, with a stick under one arm,
and a list in the other hand, stood apart in front of us, and
called name after name in the tone of a command. At each name you
would see a family gather up its brats and bundles and run for the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: involved. If this detective could prove that Gertrude feared and
disliked the murdered man, and that Mr. Armstrong had been
annoying and possibly pursuing her with hateful attentions, all
that, added to Gertrude's confession of her presence in the
billiard-room at the time of the crime, looked strange, to say
the least. The prominence of the family assured a strenuous
effort to find the murderer, and if we had nothing worse to look
forward to, we were sure of a distasteful publicity.
Mr. Jamieson shut his note-book with a snap, and thanked us.
"I have an idea," he said, apropos of nothing at all, "that at
any rate the ghost is laid here. Whatever the rappings have
 The Circular Staircase |