Today's Stichomancy for Lucille Ball

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Aesop's Fables by Aesop:

A Kid was perched up on the top of a house, and looking down saw a Wolf passing under him. Immediately he began to revile and attack his enemy. "Murderer and thief," he cried, "what do you here near honest folks' houses? How dare you make an appearance where your vile deeds are known?"

"Curse away, my young friend," said the Wolf.

"It is easy to be brave from a safe distance."

The Woodman and the Serpent

One wintry day a Woodman was tramping home from his work when he saw something black lying on the snow. When he came closer he saw it was a Serpent to all appearance dead. But he took it up

Aesop's Fables

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Herland by Charlotte Gilman:

"They treat us--well--just as they do one another. It's as if our being men was a minor incident."

I nodded. I'd noticed it myself. But Terry broke in rudely.

"Fiddlesticks!" he said. "It's because of their advanced age. They're all grandmas, I tell you--or ought to be. Great aunts, anyhow. Those girls were girls all right, weren't they?"

"Yes--" Jeff agreed, still slowly. "But they weren't afraid-- they flew up that tree and hid, like schoolboys caught out of bounds-- not like shy girls."

"And they ran like marathon winners--you'll admit that, Terry," he added.

Herland

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley:

own has ever felt; and which has stood them in such good stead, whether at home or abroad. Thus, too, sprang up the system of society by which (as the ballad sets forth) the squire's son might be a "'prentice good," and marry

"The bailiff's daughter dear That dwelt at Islington,"

without tarnishing, as he would have done on the Continent, the scutcheon of his ancestors. That which has saved England from a central despotism, such as crushed, during the eighteenth century, every nation on the Continent, is the very same peculiarity which makes the advent of the masses to a share in political power safe

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 Lady Baltimore by Owen Wister:

to wait for the law. But let no community which treats it as a public spectacle presume to call itself civilized."

He gave a perplexed smile, shaking his head over it. "Sometimes I think civilization costs--"

"Civilization costs all you've got!" I cried.

"More than I've got!" he declared. "I'm mortal tired of civilization."

"Ah, yes! What male creature is not? And neither of us will live quite long enough to see the smash-up of our own."

"Aren't you sometimes inconsistent?" he inquired, laughing.

"I hope so," I returned. "Consistency is a form of death. The dead are the only perfectly consistent people."