| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from An Episode Under the Terror by Honore de Balzac: necessary for the priest's safety came to them in roundabout ways.
Warnings and advice reached them so opportunely that they could only
have been sent by some person in the possession of state secrets. And,
at a time when famine threatened Paris, invisible hands brought
rations of "white bread" for the proscribed women in the wretched
garret. Still they fancied that Citizen Mucius Scaevola was only the
mysterious instrument of a kindness always ingenious, and no less
intelligent.
The noble ladies in the garret could no longer doubt that their
protector was the stranger of the expiatory mass on the night of the
22nd of January, 1793; and a kind of cult of him sprung up among them.
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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 Mosses From An Old Manse by Nathaniel Hawthorne: "Oh, do not tremble, my love," said her husband. "I would not
wrong either you or myself by working such inharmonious effects
upon our lives; but I would have you consider how trifling, in
comparison, is the skill requisite to remove this little hand."
At the mention of the birthmark, Georgiana, as usual, shrank as
if a redhot iron had touched her cheek.
Again Aylmer applied himself to his labors. She could hear his
voice in the distant furnace room giving directions to Aminadab,
whose harsh, uncouth, misshapen tones were audible in response,
more like the grunt or growl of a brute than human speech. After
hours of absence, Aylmer reappeared and proposed that she should
 Mosses From An Old Manse |