| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Nana, Miller's Daughter, Captain Burle, Death of Olivier Becaille by Emile Zola: this vicious pair in vague hopes of some stray favor being granted
him. Then with brain on fire Muffat decided to walk home. The
struggle within him had wholly ceased. The ideas and beliefs of the
last forty years were being drowned in a flood of new life. While
he was passing along the boulevards the roll of the last carriages
deafened him with the name of Nana; the gaslights set nude limbs
dancing before his eyes--the nude limbs, the lithe arms, the white
shoulders, of Nana. And he felt that he was hers utterly: he would
have abjured everything, sold everything, to possess her for a
single hour that very night. Youth, a lustful puberty of early
manhood, was stirring within him at last, flaming up suddenly in the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac: uselessly.
"Will they be allowed to put us in prison?" he was saying. "After
Conches they'll come to Blangy. I'm an old offender, and I shall get
three months."
"What can we do against the gendarmerie, old drunkard?" said Vaudoyer.
"Why! cut the legs of their horses with our scythes. That'll bring
them down; their muskets are not loaded, and when they find us ten to
one against them they'll decamp. If the three villages all rose and
killed two or three gendarmes, they couldn't guillotine the whole of
us. They'd have to give way, as they did on the other side of
Burgundy, where they sent a regiment. Bah! that regiment came back
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Timaeus by Plato: of the fusile substance, it does not pass into a vacuum, but into the
neighbouring air; and the air which is displaced forces together the liquid
and still moveable mass into the place which was occupied by the fire, and
unites it with itself. Thus compressed the mass resumes its equability,
and is again at unity with itself, because the fire which was the author of
the inequality has retreated; and this departure of the fire is called
cooling, and the coming together which follows upon it is termed
congealment. Of all the kinds termed fusile, that which is the densest and
is formed out of the finest and most uniform parts is that most precious
possession called gold, which is hardened by filtration through rock; this
is unique in kind, and has both a glittering and a yellow colour. A shoot
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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 Arizona Nights by Stewart Edward White: and threw it on. After that they set fire to the outfit, and,
when the poles bad burned through, the whole business fell into
the trench of its own accord. It was the neatest, automatic,
self-cocking, double-action sort of a funeral I ever saw. There
wasn't any ceremony--only crying.
The ferry business flourished at prices which were sometimes hard
to collect. But it was a case of pay or go back, and it was a
tur'ble long ways back. We got us timbers and made a scow; built
a baile and saloon and houses out of adobe; and called her
Yuma, after the Injins that had really started her. We got our
supplies through the Gulf of California, where sailing boats
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