| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: alarming celerity that part of one which sets up an idol and
that part of one which bows down and worships it.
It was a mistake, she felt, ever to have asked d'Esquerre to come
at all. She had an angry feeling that she had done it rather in
self-defiance, to rid herself finally of that instinctive fear of
him which had always troubled and perplexed her. She knew that she
had reckoned with herself before he came; but she had been equal to
so much that she had never really doubted she would be equal to
this. She had come to believe, indeed, almost arrogantly in her
own malleability and endurance; she had done so much with herself
that she had come to think that there was nothing which she could
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
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 Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: ship was going into Corfu, Sir Thomas came up the hatchway and cast
his eyes towards the gallows. 'Bangham' - Charles Jenkin heard him
say to his aide-de-camp, Lord Bangham - 'where the devil is that
other chap? I left four fellows hanging there; now I can only see
three. Mind there is another there to-morrow.' And sure enough
there was another Greek dangling the next day. 'Captain Hamilton,
of the CAMBRIAN, kept the Greeks in order afloat,' writes my
author, 'and King Tom ashore.'
From 1823 onward, the chief scene of Charles Jenkin's activities
was in the West Indies, where he was engaged off and on till 1844,
now as a subaltern, now in a vessel of his own, hunting out
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