Today's Stichomancy for Ron Howard

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry:

and receive gifts, such as they are wisest. Everywhere they

are wisest. They are the magi.

End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of THE GIFT OF THE MAGI.

The Gift of the Magi

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Bureaucracy by Honore de Balzac:

don't know my own self when I am with her."

Accordingly, this man of no principle, who six years earlier had kept a ballet-girl, and who now, thanks to his position, made himself a seraglio with the pretty wives of the under-clerks, and lived in the world of journalists and actresses, became devotedly attentive all the evening to Celestine, and was the last to leave the house.

"At last!" thought Madame Rabourdin, as she undressed that night, "we have the place! Twelve thousand francs a year and perquisites, beside the rents of our farms at Grajeux,--nearly twenty thousand francs a year. It is not affluence, but at least it isn't poverty."

CHAPTER IV

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen:

consideration of their age, characters, or feelings, could be given;--but her mother must always be carried away by her imagination on any interesting subject, and therefore instead of an inquiry, she passed it off with a smile.

"He opened his whole heart to me yesterday as we travelled. It came out quite unawares, quite undesignedly. I, you may well believe, could talk of nothing but my child;--he could not conceal his distress; I saw that it equalled my own, and he perhaps, thinking that mere friendship, as the world now goes, would not justify so warm a sympathy--or rather,

Sense and Sensibility

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 Pathology of Lying, Etc. by William and Mary Healy:

companionship which the mother had said she had broken up. It seems that Emma had for a year, quite clandestinely, been familiar with this family. She apparently now desired to reveal the results of the acquaintance. Long ago the older sister, at present in a Reform School, boasted of her escapades with boys. Emma states that she herself never talked of these topics with her mother, who had said that girls who don't do such things should not talk about them. But Tessie, the younger sister of the delinquent girl, says many bad words about boys. These words and ideas about them bother Emma much. They come up in her mind, ``sometimes at night and sometimes in the day.'' She even dreams