| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Circular Staircase by Mary Roberts Rinehart: pretense at bravery, and slept regularly in my dressing-room on
the couch, with a prayer-book and a game knife from the kitchen
under her pillow, thus preparing for both the natural and the
supernatural. That was the way things stood that Thursday night,
when I myself took a hand in the struggle.
CHAPTER XXIII
WHILE THE STABLES BURNED
About nine o'clock that night Liddy came into the living-room and
reported that one of the housemaids declared she had seen two men
slip around the corner of the stable. Gertrude had been sitting
staring in front of her, jumping at every sound. Now she turned
The Circular Staircase |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling: into our lines while we were asleep. D'you think they'll kill
us?"
"I've a very great mind to give you a number-one kicking,"
said Billy. "The idea of a fourteen-hand mule with your training
disgracing the battery before this gentleman!"
"Gently, gently!" said the troop-horse. "Remember they are
always like this to begin with. The first time I ever saw a man
(it was in Australia when I was a three-year-old) I ran for half a
day, and if I'd seen a camel, I should have been running still."
Nearly all our horses for the English cavalry are brought to
India from Australia, and are broken in by the troopers
The Jungle Book |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Reminiscences of Tolstoy by Leo Tolstoy: straight.
"Thank heaven!" we would exclaim, "nobody saw me! What a
fool I should have felt!" So we would ride on.
The horse's even pace would begin to rock us to sleep,
feeling rather bored at nothing getting up; when all of a sudden,
just at the moment we least expected it, right in front of us,
twenty paces away, would jump up a gray hare as if from the
bowels of the earth.
The dogs had seen it before we had, and had started forward
already in full pursuit. We began to bawl, "Tally-ho! tally-ho!"
like madmen, flogging our horses with all our might, and flying
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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 The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: this double purpose attained, these two oranges kept
simultaneously dancing in the air, that, consciously or not,
afford the reader his delight. Nay, and this wit, so little
recognised, is the necessary organ of that philosophy which
we so much admire. That style is therefore the most perfect,
not, as fools say, which is the most natural, for the most
natural is the disjointed babble of the chronicler; but which
attains the highest degree of elegant and pregnant
implication unobtrusively; or if obtrusively, then with the
greatest gain to sense and vigour. Even the derangement of
the phrases from their (so-called) natural order is luminous
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