Today's Stichomancy for Hans Christian Andersen

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Blix by Frank Norris:

incrusted, at the entrance of the Golden Gate. They turned its angle, and there rolled the Pacific, a blue floor of shifting water, stretching out there forever and forever over the curve of the earth, over the shoulder of the world, with never a sail in view and never a break from horizon to horizon. They followed down the shore, sometimes upon the old and broken flume that runs along the seaward face of the hills that rise from the beach, or sometimes upon the beach itself, stepping from bowlder to bowlder, or holding along at the edge of the water upon reaches of white, hard sand.

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Miracle Mongers and Their Methods by Harry Houdini:

in his best days, the strongest man in the known world at all-round straight lifting. Cyr did not give the impression of being an athlete, nor of a man in training, for he appeared to be over-fat and not particularly muscular; but he made records in lifting which, to the best of my knowledge, no other man has been able to duplicate.

John Grun Marx, a Luxemberger, must have been among the strongest men in the world at the time I knew him. We worked on the same

Miracle Mongers and Their Methods

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Return of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

human life remained.

They had looked in vain for the owner of the voice which had frightened off the men who had been detailed to put the torch to the huts, but not even the keenest eye among them had been able to locate him. They had seen the puff of smoke from the tree following the shot that brought down the Arab, but, though a volley had immediately been loosed into its foliage, there had been no indication that it had been effective.

Tarzan was too intelligent to be caught in any such trap, and so the report of his shot had scarcely died away before

The Return of Tarzan

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 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy:

and written about it, in their obscure words saying the same thing--we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must live for and what is good. I and all men have only one firm, incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot be explained by the reason--it is outside it, and has no causes and can have no effects.

"If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, a reward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

"And yet I know it, and we all know it.

"What could be a greater miracle than that?

Anna Karenina