| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: House, at the northeast corner. There we embarked our tents and
blankets, our pots and pans, and bags of flour and potatoes and
bacon and other delicacies, our rods and guns, and last, but not
least, our axes (without which man in the woods is a helpless
creature), in two birch-bark canoes, and went flying down the
Grande Decharge.
It is a wonderful place, this outlet of Lake St. John. All the
floods of twenty rivers are gathered here, and break forth through
a net of islands in a double stream, divided by the broad Ile
d'Alma, into the Grande Decharge and the Petite Decharge. The
southern outlet is small, and flows somewhat more quietly at first.
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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 Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: descendant of Roman senators as venerable as Caesar and Sylla.
Genovese may smoke an Eastern hookah, and the Prince of Varese cannot
even have enough cigars!"
He tossed the end he was smoking into the sea. The Prince of Varese
found cigars at the Duchess Cataneo's; how gladly would he have laid
the treasures of the world at her feet! She studied all his caprices,
and was happy to gratify them. He made his only meal at her house--his
supper; for all his money was spent in clothes and his place in the
/Fenice/. He had also to pay a hundred francs a year as wages to his
father's old gondolier; and he, to serve him for that sum, had to live
exclusively on rice. Also he kept enough to take a cup of black coffee
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