Today's Stichomancy for Benjamin Franklin

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tarzan the Untamed by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

and pulled a quantity of long grass to make a comfortable seat over which she spread her saddle blanket. Then she unstrapped a heavy, military coat from the cantle of her saddle and donned it, for the air was already chill.

Seating herself where she could lean against the saddle she prepared to maintain a sleepless vigil throughout the night. For an hour the silence was broken only by the distant booming of the guns and the low noises of the feeding horse and then, from possibly a mile away, came the rumbling thunder of a lion's roar. The girl started and laid her hand upon the rifle at her side. A little shudder ran through her

Tarzan the Untamed

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Life of the Spider by J. Henri Fabre:

multiplicity of arches, one and all alike, will ever discover how the fugitive vanished so suddenly.

While the Clotho displays a more simple ingenuity as regards her defensive machinery, she is incomparably ahead of the Mygale in the matter of domestic comfort. Let us open her cabin. What luxury! We are taught how a Sybarite of old was unable to rest, owing to the presence of a crumpled rose-leaf in his bed. The Clotho is quite as fastidious. Her couch is more delicate than swan's-down and whiter than the fleece of the clouds where brood the summer storms. It is the ideal blanket. Above is a canopy or tester of equal softness. Between the two nestles the Spider, short-legged,

The Life of the Spider

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Caesar's Commentaries in Latin by Julius Caesar:

possessionis culmina Alpium oceupare conari et ea loca finitimae provinciae adiungere sibi persuasum habebant.

His nuntiis acceptis Galba, cum neque opus hibernorum munitionesque plene essent perfectae neque de frumento reliquoque commeatu satis esset provisum quod deditione facta obsidibusque acceptis nihil de bello timendum existimaverat, consilio celeriter convocato sententias exquirere coepit. Quo in consilio, cum tantum repentini periculi praeter opinionem accidisset ac iam omnia fere superiora loca multitudine armatorum completa conspicerentur neque subsidio veniri neque commeatus supportari interclusis itineribus possent, prope iam desperata salute non nullae eius modi sententiae dicebantur, ut impedimentis relictis eruptione facta isdem

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 The Golden Threshold by Sarojini Naidu:

writer was seventeen; the later ones were sent to me from India in 1904, when she was twenty-five; and they belong, I think, almost wholly to those two periods. As they seemed to me to have an individual beauty of their own, I thought they ought to be published. The writer hesitated. "Your letter made me very proud and very sad," she wrote. "Is it possible that I have written verses that are 'filled with beauty,' and is it possible that you really think them worthy of being given to the world? You know how high my ideal of Art is; and to me my poor casual little poems seem to be less than beautiful--I mean with that final enduring beauty that I desire." And, in another letter,