Today's Stichomancy for Britney Spears

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Life in the Iron-Mills by Rebecca Davis:

over the path,--that was all. Do you want to hear the end of it? You wish me to make a tragic story out of it? Why, in the police-reports of the morning paper you can find a dozen such tragedies: hints of shipwrecks unlike any that ever befell on the high seas; hints that here a power was lost to heaven,--that there a soul went down where no tide can ebb or flow. Commonplace enough the hints are,--jocose sometimes, done up in rhyme.

Doctor May a month after the night I have told you of, was reading to his wife at breakfast from this fourth column of the morning-paper: an unusual thing,--these police-reports not

Life in the Iron-Mills

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken:

We peer in each other's veins and see No sign of the things we saw this night. Only, a song is in your ears, A song you have heard, you think, in dream: The song which only the demon hears, In the dark forest where maenads scream . . .

'By the clear waters where once I died . . . In the calm evening bright with stars . . . ' What do the strange words mean? you say,-- And touch my hand, and turn away.

XIII.

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Aspern Papers by Henry James:

"Yes, but not for half a year. Only by the month."

"Oh, I must think of that then." She seemed disappointed that I would not tie myself to a period, and I guessed that she wished both to secure me and to discourage me; to say severely, "Do you dream that you can get off with less than six months? Do you dream that even by the end of that time you will be appreciably nearer your victory?" What was more in my mind was that she had a fancy to play me the trick of making me engage myself when in fact she had annihilated the papers. There was a moment when my suspense on this point was so acute that I all but broke out with the question, and what kept it back

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 Catriona by Robert Louis Stevenson:

fellow before he was yet twenty. As for James, it seems - at this date of the proceedings, with the sentence as good as pronounced - he has no hope but in the King's mercy. May not his Majesty, then, be more pointedly addressed, the characters of these high officers sheltered from the public, and myself kept out of a position which I think spells ruin for me?"

They all sat and gazed into their glasses, and I could see they found my attitude on the affair unpalatable. But Miller was ready at all events.

"If I may be allowed to put my young friend's notion in more formal shape," says he, "I understand him to propose that we should embody the