| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland by Olive Schreiner: was not yellow corn, but black men's heads; and he thought when he looked
back they lay behind him in rows, like the corn in sheaves.
The logs sent up a flame clear and high, and, where they split, showed a
burning core inside: the cracking and spluttering sounded in his brain
like the discharge of a battery of artillery. Then he thought suddenly of
a black woman he and another man caught alone in the bush, her baby on her
back, but young and pretty. Well, they didn't shoot her!--and a black
woman wasn't white! His mother didn't understand these things; it was all
so different in England from South Africa. You couldn't be expected to do
the same sort of things here as there. He had an unpleasant feeling that
he was justifying himself to his mother, and that he didn't know how to.
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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 Fisherman's Luck by Henry van Dyke: It is strange how long a small fire will leave its mark. The
charred sticks, the black coals, do not decay easily. If they lie
well up the hank, out of reach of the spring floods, they will stay
there for years. If you have chanced to build a rough fireplace of
stones from the brook, it seems almost as if it would last forever.
There is a mossy knoll beneath a great butternut-tree on the
Swiftwater where such a fireplace was built four years ago; and
whenever I come to that place now I lay the rod aside, and sit down
for a little while by the fast-flowing water, and remember.
This is what I see: A man wading up the stream, with a creel over
his shoulder, and perhaps a dozen trout in it; two little lads in
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