Today's Stichomancy for Jennifer Garner

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Mistress Wilding by Rafael Sabatini:

"And since all is lost, why.. ." Trenchard blew out his cheeks and smacked fist into palm. "I am with you," said he.

CHAPTER XXIV JUSTICE

It has fallen to my lot in the course of this veridical chronicle of Mr. Anthony Wilding's connection with the Rebellion in the West, and of his wedding and post-nuptial winning of Ruth Westmacott, to relate certain matters of incident and personality that may be accounted strange. But the strangest yet remains to be related. For in spite of all that had passed between Sir Rowland Blake and the Westmacotts on that memorable night of Sunday to Monday, on which the battle of Sedgemoor was lost and

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Amy Foster by Joseph Conrad:

tunes of his country. When the boy was born, he got elevated at the 'Coach and Horses,' essayed again a song and a dance, and was again ejected. People expressed their commiseration for a woman married to that Jack-in-the-box. He didn't care. There was a man now (he told me boastfully) to whom he could sing and talk in the language of his country, and show how to dance by-and-by.

"But I don't know. To me he appeared to have grown less springy of step, heavier in body, less keen of eye. Imagination, no doubt; but it seems

Amy Foster

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Unconscious Comedians by Honore de Balzac:

himself that if he were weak enough to help this compatriot (to him utterly unknown) he should have the whole department prone upon him, his bell-rope would break, his valet leave him, he should have difficulties with his landlord about the stairway, and the other lodgers would assuredly complain of the smell of garlic pervading the house. Consequently, he looked at his visitor as a butcher looks at a sheep whose throat he intends to cut. But whether the rustic comprehended the stab of that glance or not, he went on to say (so Massol told me), 'I've as much ambition as other men. I will never go back to my native place, if I ever do go back, unless I am a rich man. Paris is the antechamber of Paradise. They tell me that you who write

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 Of The Nature of Things by Lucretius:

Or conquer Time with length of days, if not Because for all begotten things abides The changeless stuff, and what from that may spring Is fixed forevermore? Lastly we see How far the tilled surpass the fields untilled And to the labour of our hands return Their more abounding crops; there are indeed Within the earth primordial germs of things, Which, as the ploughshare turns the fruitful clods And kneads the mould, we quicken into birth. Else would ye mark, without all toil of ours,

Of The Nature of Things