Today's Stichomancy for John F. Kennedy

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy:

every man; that..." They interrupted him, for this was not to the point. Why was he in the yard of a burning house where witnesses had seen him? He replied that he had gone out to see what was happening in Moscow. Again they interrupted him: they had not asked where he was going, but why he was found near the fire? Who was he? they asked, repeating their first question, which he had declined to answer. Again he replied that he could not answer it.

"Put that down, that's bad... very bad," sternly remarked the general with the white mustache and red flushed face.

On the fourth day fires broke out on the Zubovski rampart.

Pierre and thirteen others were moved to the coach house of a

War and Peace

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac:

woman rarely took bread from the baker; she appeared so seldom in the market, that the least credulous of the townspeople ended by attributing to these strange beings the knowledge of some secret for the maintenance of life. Those who dabbled in alchemy declared that Maitre Cornelius had the power of making gold. Men of science averred that he had found the Universal Panacea. According to many of the country-people to whom the townsfolk talked of him, Cornelius was a chimerical being, and many of them came into the town to look at his house out of mere curiosity.

The young seigneur whom we left in front of that house looked about him, first at the hotel de Poitiers, the home of his mistress, and

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Bucolics by Virgil:

Phyllis doth hazels love, and while she loves, Myrtle nor bay the hazel shall out-vie."

THYRSIS "Ash in the forest is most beautiful, Pine in the garden, poplar by the stream, Fir on the mountain-height; but if more oft Thou'ldst come to me, fair Lycidas, to thee Both forest-ash, and garden-pine should bow."

MELIBOEUS These I remember, and how Thyrsis strove For victory in vain. From that time forth

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 When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

leading into a cavernous void, perfectly black--evidently a similar vault belonging to the next house.

The whole place was ghostly, full of shadows, shivery with possibilities. It was Mr. Harbison finally who took Jim's candle and crawled through the aperture. We waited in dead silence, listening to his feet crunching over the coal beyond, watching the faint yellow light that came through the ragged opening in the wall. Then he came back and called through to us.

"Place is locked, over here," he said. "Heavy oak door at the head of the steps. Whoever made that opening has done a prodigious amount of labor for nothing."