Today's Stichomancy for Oprah Winfrey

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard:

for the gates were guarded and the wall was too high to climb. There they were slaughtered every man of them, and may God, who sees all, reward their murderers! It was soon over; within ten minutes of the waving of the cloth, those six hundred men were stretched upon the pavement dead or dying, and with shouts of victory the Spaniards were despoiling their corpses of the rich ornaments they had worn.

Then I turned to Guatemoc and said, 'It seems that you did well not to join in yonder revel.'

But Guatemoc made no answer. He stared at the dead and those who had murdered them, and said nothing. Only Otomie spoke: 'You

Montezuma's Daughter

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Aesop's Fables by Aesop:

Gratitude and greed go not together.

The Man and the Serpent

A Countryman's son by accident trod upon a Serpent's tail, which turned and bit him so that he died. The father in a rage got his axe, and pursuing the Serpent, cut off part of its tail. So the Serpent in revenge began stinging several of the Farmer's cattle and caused him severe loss. Well, the Farmer thought it best to make it up with the Serpent, and brought food and honey to the mouth of its lair, and said to it: "Let's forget and forgive; perhaps you were right to punish my son, and take vengeance on my cattle, but surely I was right in trying to revenge him; now that

Aesop's Fables

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Moral Emblems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

'What have you caught?' the peasant cries.

'Nothing as yet,' the Fool replies.

MORAL TALES

Poem: I - ROBIN AND BEN: OR, THE PIRATE AND THE APOTHECARY

Come, lend me an attentive ear A startling moral tale to hear, Of Pirate Rob and Chemist Ben, And different destinies of men.

Deep in the greenest of the vales That nestle near the coast of Wales, The heaving main but just in view,

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 The Oakdale Affair by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

gail Prim was last seed with this here Oskaloosa Kid, durn him."

"Thanks," said Bridge politely, "and now may I make my final statement before going to meet my maker?"

"Go on," growled the man.

"You won't interrupt me?"

"Naw, go on."

"All right! You damn fools have made up your minds to hang us. I doubt if anything I can say to you will alter your determination for the reason that if all the brains in this crowd were collected in one individual he

The Oakdale Affair