Today's Stichomancy for Frederick II

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The House of Dust by Conrad Aiken:

Asked her to pose for them; her eyes and forehead,-- Dark brown eyes, and a smooth and pallid forehead,-- Were thought so beautiful.--And so they were. Pauline . . . These violets are like words remembered . . . Darling! she whispered . . . Darling! . . . Darling! . . . Darling! Well, I suppose such days can come but once. Lord, how happy we were! . . .

Here, if you only knew it, is a story-- Here, in these leaves. I stopped my work to tell it, And then, when I had finished, went on thinking: A man I saw on a train . . . I was still a boy . . .

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Pellucidar by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

into the sands of the Sahara, we broke through the surface of Pellucidar.

Fortune once again favored me by the slightest of margins, for when I opened the door in the prospector's outer jacket I saw that we had missed coming up through the bottom of an ocean by but a few hundred yards.

The aspect of the surrounding country was entirely unfamiliar to me--I had no conception of precisely where I was upon the one hundred and twenty-four million square miles of Pellucidar's vast land surface.

Pellucidar

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from U. S. Project Trinity Report by Carl Maag and Steve Rohrer:

According to dosimetry data, entrance logs, and other records, about 1,000 individuals were at the test site at some time between 16 July 1945 and the end of 1946. This number includes not only the scientists, technicians, and military personnel who were part of Project TRINITY but also many visitors. Some of the scientists took their wives and children on a tour of the area near ground zero, particularly to view the green glass called "trinitite," which covered the crater floor. Trinitite was the product of the detonation's extreme beat, which melted and mixed desert sand, tower steel, and other debris (1; 8; 9; 16).

CHAPTER 3

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 Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy:

you or your leader meant to carry out for the rescue of the Comte de Tournay and others. The Scarlet Pimpernel--Percy, my husband--has gone on this errand himself to-day. Chauvelin knows that the Scarlet Pimpernel and Percy Blakeney are one and the same person. He will follow him to Calais, and there will lay hands on him. You know as well as I do the fate that awaits him at the hands of the Revolutionary Government of France. No interference from England--from King George himself--would save him. Robespierre and his gang would see to it that the interference came too late. But not only that, the much-trusted leader will also have been unconsciously the means of revealing the hiding-place of the Comte de Tournay and of

The Scarlet Pimpernel