| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Copy-Cat & Other Stories by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman: was Jim Patterson who found her, and in the most
unlikely of places. A forlorn pair with a multi-
plicity of forlorn children lived in a tumble-down
house about half a mile from the grove. The man's
name was Silas Thomas, and his wife's was Sarah.
Poor Sarah had lost a large part of the small wit she
had originally owned several years before, when her
youngest daughter, aged four, died. All the babies
that had arrived since had not consoled her for the
death of that little lamb, by name Viola May, nor
restored her full measure of under-wit. Poor Sarah
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: It bristled there - somewhere near at hand, however unseen still -
as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at
last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a
sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent
with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in
just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the
drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole
situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was
already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be
in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form,
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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 Economist by Xenophon: improvement, more than half the pleasure to be got from the possession
vanishes. The height of happiness was, he maintained, to see your
purchase, be it dead chattel or live animal,[33] go on improving daily
under your own eyes.[34] Now, nothing shows a larger increase[35] than
a piece of land reclaimed from barren waste and bearing fruit a
hundredfold. I can assure you, Socrates, many is the farm which my
father and I made worth I do not know how many times more than its
original value. And then, Socrates, this valuable invention[36] is so
easy to learn that you who have but heard it know and understand it as
well as I myself do, and can go away and teach it to another if you
choose. Yet my father did not learn it of another, nor did he discover
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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 Massimilla Doni by Honore de Balzac: greatest performers!"
By this time, the doctor and Vendramin, Capraja, Cataneo, and Genovese
had made their way to the piazzetta. It was midnight. The glittering
bay, outlined by the churches of San Giorgio and San Paulo at the end
of the Giudecca, and the beginning of the Grand Canal, that opens so
mysteriously under the /Dogana/ and the church of Santa Maria della
Salute, lay glorious and still. The moon shone on the barques along
the Riva de' Schiavoni. The waters of Venice, where there is no tide,
looked as if they were alive, dancing with a myriad spangles. Never
had a singer a more splendid stage.
Genovese, with an emphatic flourish, seemed to call Heaven and Earth
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