| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart: Luckily they were busy with their letters and it went unnoticed,
the smell of burning straw not rising, so to speak, above the
sulphur in the spring.
Senator Biggs went from one table to another telling how well he
felt since he stopped eating, and trying to coax the other men to
starve with him.
It's funny how a man with a theory about his stomach isn't happy
until he has made some other fellow swallow it.
"Well," he said, standing in front of the fire with a glass of
water in his hand, "it's worth while to feel like this. My
head's as clear as a bell. I don't care to eat; I don't want to
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: people. They are therefore more in danger of neglect or suppression
than the other set, which have all the adults, all the laws, all the
religions on their side. How is the child to be secured its due share
of both bodies of doctrine?
The Schoolboy and the Homeboy
In practice what happens is that parents notice that boys brought up
at home become mollycoddles, or prigs, or duffers, unable to take care
of themselves. They see that boys should learn to rough it a little
and to mix with children of their own age. This is natural enough.
When you have preached at and punished a boy until he is a moral
cripple, you are as much hampered by him as by a physical cripple; and
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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 The Jungle Tales of Tarzan by Edgar Rice Burroughs: night--the roar of the lion, the scream of the leopard,
the hideous laughter of Dango, the hyena, were music
to the ears of the ape-man.
The soft padding of unseen feet, the rustling of leaves
and grasses to the passage of fierce beasts, the sheen
of opalesque eyes flaming through the dark, the million
sounds which proclaimed the teeming life that one might
hear and scent, though seldom see, constituted the appeal
of the nocturnal jungle to Tarzan.
Tonight he had swung a wide circle--toward the east first
and then toward the south, and now he was rounding back again
The Jungle Tales 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 Pierrette by Honore de Balzac: the principal families of Provins.
The Rogrons had never gone into any society; they had never left their
shop, knowing absolutely no one in Paris, and now they were athirst
for the pleasures of social life. On their arrival in Provins they
found their former masters in Paris (long since returned to the
provinces), Monsieur and Madame Julliard, lately of the "Chinese
Worm," their children and grandchildren; the Guepin family, or rather
the Guepin clan, the youngest scion of which now kept the "Three
Distaffs"; and thirdly, Madame Guenee from whom they had purchased the
"Family Sister," and whose three daughters were married and settled in
Provins. These three races, Julliard, Guepin, and Guenee, had spread
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