Today's Stichomancy for Doc Holliday

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Schoolmistress and Other Stories by Anton Chekhov:

might touch her by a description of nature in Tchernigov. No doubt she loves the place if she has been born there."

"Are you dull here?" he asked.

"Of course I am dull."

"Why don't you go away from here if you are dull?"

"Where should I go to? Go begging or what?"

"Begging would be easier than living here."

How do you know that? Have you begged?"

"Yes, when I hadn't the money to study. Even if I hadn't anyone could understand that. A beggar is anyway a free man, and you are a slave."

The Schoolmistress and Other Stories

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Danny's Own Story by Don Marquis:

that wasn't the worst of it, fur the exposure had crawled into his lungs by the time he found a house, and he got newmonia into them also, and like to of died. Whilst I was laying sick he had been sick also, only his'n lasted much longer.

But he tells me he has jest struck an idea fur a big scheme. No little schemes go fur him any more, he says. He wants money. Real money.

"How you going to get it?" I asts him.

"Come along and I'll tell you," he says. "We'll take a walk, and I'll show you how I got my idea."

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Blue Flower by Henry van Dyke:

a happy ending. And yet--what was it that disturbed me now and then with forebodings? Something, doubtless, in the character of Keene, for he was the dominant personality. The key of the situation lay with him. He was the centre of interest. Yet he was the one who seemed not perfectly in harmony, not quite at home, as if something beckoned and urged him away.

"I am glad you are to stay," said he, "yet I wonder at it. You will find the life narrow, after all your travels. Ulysses at Ithaca--you will surely be restless to see the world again."

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 New Poems by Robert Louis Stevenson:

TO SYDNEY

NOT thine where marble-still and white Old statues share the tempered light And mock the uneven modern flight, But in the stream Of daily sorrow and delight To seek a theme.

I too, O friend, have steeled my heart Boldly to choose the better part, To leave the beaten ways of art, And wholly free