Today's Stichomancy for Ray Bradbury

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Somebody's Little Girl by Martha Young:

Bessie Bell looked and thought. She thought this lady looked like a Sister--and yet there was a difference. She looked also like Just- A-Lady, and she also looked grand and important enough for a Mama.

Bessie Bell looked and thought, but she could not tell just exactly what this lady was.

It was best that she should ask, and then she would surely know.

So she asked: ``Are vou a Lady, ma'am?''

``I hope so, little girl,'' the lady said.

``I thought, maybe, you were a Sister,'' said Bessie Bell.

``No,'' said the lady.

``Like Sister Mary Felice, and Sister Angela, and Sister Helen

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Royalty Restored/London Under Charles II by J. Fitzgerald Molloy:

be heard at the King's Bench Court. His trial did not take place until May, 1685, on which occasion the lord chief justice, in summing up the evidence, declared, "There does not remain the slightest doubt that Oates is the blackest and most perjured villain on the face of the earth."

After a quarter of an hour's absence from court, the jury returned a verdict of guilty, and sentence was pronounced against him. He was stripped of his canonical habit; forced to walk through all the courts of Westminster Hall proclaiming his crimes; to stand an hour on the pillory opposite Westminster Hall gate on Monday; an hour on the pillory at the Royal Exchange on

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Old Indian Legends by Zitkala-Sa:

over the other. Far forward he stooped, stretching his long thin neck like a duck, to see what lay under a fur coat beyond the bunch of coarse grass.

A sleek gray-faced prairie wolf! his pointed black nose tucked in between his four feet drawn snugly together; his handsome bushy tail wound over his nose and feet; a coyote fast asleep in the shadow of a bunch of grass!--this is what Iktomi spied. Carefully he raised one foot and cautiously reached out with his toes. Gently, gently he lifted the foot behind and placed it before the other. Thus he came nearer and nearer to the round fur ball lying motionless under the sage grass.

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 Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

might lay claim to.

But Bertha Kircher saw only a hideous beast, a fierce and terrible caricature of man. Could Go-lat have known what passed through her mind, he must have been terribly cha- grined, though the chances are that he would have attributed it to a lack of discernment on her part. Tarzan heard the girl's cry and looking up saw at a glance the cause of her terror. Leaping lightly over the boma, he ran swiftly toward her as Go-lat lumbered closer to the girl the while he voiced his emotions in low gutturals which, while in reality the most amicable of advances, sounded to the girl like the growling of

Tarzan the Untamed