Today's Stichomancy for Yasser Arafat

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Merry Men by Robert Louis Stevenson:

was no place so healthful in the arrondissement. By the end of the second year, he protested there was none so wholesome in the whole department. And for some time before he met Jean-Marie he had been prepared to challenge all France and the better part of Europe for a rival to his chosen spot.

'Doctor,' he would say - 'doctor is a foul word. It should not be used to ladies. It implies disease. I remark it, as a flaw in our civilisation, that we have not the proper horror of disease. Now I, for my part, have washed my hands of it; I have renounced my laureation; I am no doctor; I am only a worshipper of the true goddess Hygieia. Ah, believe me, it is she who has the cestus!

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

MRS. CHEVELEY. Call it what you choose. I hold your husband in the hollow of my hand, and if you are wise you will make him do what I tell him.

LADY CHILTERN. [Rising and going towards her.] You are impertinent. What has my husband to do with you? With a woman like you?

MRS. CHEVELEY [With a bitter laugh.] In this world like meets with like. It is because your husband is himself fraudulent and dishonest that we pair so well together. Between you and him there are chasms. He and I are closer than friends. We are enemies linked together. The same sin binds us.

LADY CHILTERN. How dare you class my husband with yourself? How

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini:

first vomit he makes the water seems to be a full deep claret: you are to observe that his gall-pill in the morning, and so many glasses of luke-warm water afterwards, will force him into a sudden capacity to vomit, which vomit upon so much warm water, is for the most part so violent on him, that he cannot forbear if he would.

You are again to understand that all that comes from him is red of itself, or has a tincture of it from the first Brazil water;

Miracle Mongers and Their Methods

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 Danny's Own Story by Don Marquis:

to be scared. And I WAS scared clean up into my hair. I stared hard, fur I couldn't take my eyes away. Then purty soon I seen if it was a ghost it must be a woman ghost. Fur it was dressed in light-coloured clothes that moved jest a little in the breeze, and the clothes was so near the colour of the moonlight they seemed to kind of silver into it. You would of said it had jest floated there, and was waiting fur to float away agin when the breeze blowed a little stronger, or the moon drawed it.