Today's Stichomancy for Christina Aguilera

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Heritage of the Desert by Zane Grey:

were lank brown men very like Naab's sons. Some wore sheepskin "chaps," some blue overalls; all wore boots and spurs, wide soft hats, and in their belts, far to the back, hung large Colt's revolvers.

'We'll buy what you need, just as if you expected to ride the ranges for me to-morrow," said Naab. "The first thing we ask a new man is, can he ride? Next, can he shoot?"

"I could ride before I got so weak. I've never handled a revolver, but I can shoot a rifle. Never shot at anything except targets, and it seemed to come natural for me to hit them."

"Good. We'll show you some targets--lions, bears, deer, cats, wolves. There's a fine forty-four Winchester here that my friend Abe has been

The Heritage of the Desert

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Phantasmagoria and Other Poems by Lewis Carroll:

Tell them to set the dinner on!"

The vision passed: the ghosts were fled: He saw once more that woman dread: He heard once more the words she said.

He left her, and he turned aside: He sat and watched the coming tide Across the shores so newly dried.

He wondered at the waters clear, The breeze that whispered in his ear, The billows heaving far and near,

And why he had so long preferred

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling:

Long before the fruit orchards of Logan or the shining levels of the Salt Lake had been reached, that mayor--himself a Gentile, and one renowned for his dealings with the Mormons--told me that the great question of the existence of the power within the power was being gradually solved by the ballot and by education.

All the beauty of the valley could not make me forget it. And the valley is very fair. Bench after bench of land, flat as a table against the flanks of the ringing hills, marks where the Salt Lake rested for awhile in its collapse from an inland sea to a lake fifty miles long and thirty broad.

There are the makings of a very fine creed about Mormonism. To

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 Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson:

of frost. Sounds, too, are absent: not a bird pipes, not a bough waves, in the dead, windless atmosphere. If a sleigh goes by, the sleigh-bells ring, and that is all; you work all winter through to no other accompaniment but the crunching of your steps upon the frozen snow.

It is the curse of the Alpine valleys to be each one village from one end to the other. Go where you please, houses will still be in sight, before and behind you, and to the right and left. Climb as high as an invalid is able, and it is only to spy new habitations nested in the wood. Nor is that all; for about the health resort the walks are besieged by single people walking rapidly with plaids about