| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Baby Mine by Margaret Mayo: adjoining room with the air of a conqueror. Aggie looked at
Zoie, with dreadful foreboding.
"You don't suppose it could be?" she paused.
"My baby!" shrieked the voice of the Italian mother from the
adjoining room. "Where IS he?"
Regardless of the discomfort of his three disgruntled charges,
Jimmy began to circle the room. So agitated was his mind that he
could scarcely hear Aggie, who was reporting proceedings from her
place at the bedroom door.
"She's come up the fire-escape," cried Aggie; "she's beating
Alfred to death."
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: up lightly with a pitchfork. It was the fever mist. Out from among the
scrub, too, came little spirals of vapour, as though there were hundreds
of tiny fires alight in it--reek rising from thousands of tons of
rotting vegetation. It was a beautiful place, but the beauty was the
beauty of death; and all those lines and blots of vapour wrote one great
word across the surface of the country, and that word was 'fever.'
"It was a dreadful year of illness that. I came, I remember, to one
little kraal of Knobnoses, and went up to it to see if I could get some
'maas', or curdled butter-milk, and a few mealies. As I drew near I was
struck with the silence of the place. No children began to chatter, and
no dogs barked. Nor could I see any native sheep or cattle. The place,
Long Odds |
