Today's Stichomancy for Matt Damon

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner:

good, and the sheep are better since we washed them. Tell father the dip he recommended is very good.

"Em sends her love to you. She is making me some woollen shirts; but they don't fit me so nicely as those mother made me.

"Write soon to

"Your loving brother, Gregory.

"P.S.--She drove past just now; I was sitting on the kraal wall right before her eyes, and she never even bowed. G.N.R."

Chapter 2.VI. A Boer-wedding.

"I didn't know before you were so fond of riding hard," said Gregory to his little betrothed.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Intentions by Oscar Wilde:

illiterate, and are always prating to us on their coarse gritty canvases of their unnecessary selves and their unnecessary opinions, and spoiling by a vulgar over-emphasis that fine contempt of nature which is the best and only modest thing about them. One tires, at the end, of the work of individuals whose individuality is always noisy, and generally uninteresting. There is far more to be said in favour of that newer school at Paris, the ARCHAICISTES, as they call themselves, who, refusing to leave the artist entirely at the mercy of the weather, do not find the ideal of art in mere atmospheric effect, but seek rather for the imaginative beauty of design and the loveliness of fair colour, and rejecting the tedious

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Hated Son by Honore de Balzac:

lieutenant of his company to come nearer, saying to him, "I am fortunate, Baron d'Artagnon, in being able to repair my loss; behold my son!" he felt an icy hand in his. Turning round, he looked at the new Duc de Nivron, and, thinking him dead, he uttered a cry of horror which appalled the assemblage.

Beauvouloir rushed to the platform, took the young man in his arms, and carried him away, saying to his master, "You have killed him by not preparing him for this ceremony."

"He can never have a child if he is like that!" cried the duke, following Beauvouloir into the seignorial chamber, where the doctor laid the young heir upon the bed.

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 Lost Continent by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

which sprang from the survivors continued to fight among themselves because they knew no better condition of society. War razed the works of man--war and pestilence razed man. God give that there shall never be such another war!"

You all know how Porfirio Johnson returned to Pan-America with John Alvarez in chains; how Alvarez's trial raised a popular demonstration that the government could not ignore. His eloquent appeal--not for himself, but for me--is historic, as are its results. You know how a fleet was sent across the Atlantic to search for me, how the restrictions against crossing thirty to one hundred seventy-five were

Lost Continent