Today's Stichomancy for M. C. Escher

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler:

Well, and what was the consequence?

JESSAMY

The consequence!--Ah! forgive me, my dear friend, but you New England gentlemen have such a laud- able curiosity of seeing the bottom of everything;-- why, to be honest, I confess I saw the blooming cherub of a consequence smiling in its angelic mother's arms, about ten months afterwards.

JONATHAN

Well, if I follow all your plans, make them six bows, and all that, shall I have such little cherubim conse-

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Idylls of the King by Alfred Tennyson:

For there was no man knew from whence he came; But after tempest, when the long wave broke All down the thundering shores of Bude and Bos, There came a day as still as heaven, and then They found a naked child upon the sands Of dark Tintagil by the Cornish sea; And that was Arthur; and they fostered him Till he by miracle was approven King: And that his grave should be a mystery From all men, like his birth; and could he find A woman in her womanhood as great

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad:

the doorway.

He was sitting up in his bed-place. He was progressing toward the world of living men; if he could hardly have been said to have rejoined it yet. He nodded to me his frail and bony head in a wisely mysterious assent.

"Oh, yes, I know what you mean," I said. "But you cannot expect me to believe that a dead man has the power to put out of joint the meteor- ology of this part of the world. Though indeed it seems to have gone utterly wrong. The land and

The Shadow Line

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 Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac:

district but Langlume, the tenant of his own flour-mill. The choice was disastrous. Not only were the interests of mayor and miller diametrically opposed, but Langlume had long hatched swindling projects with Rigou, who lent him money to carry on his business, or to acquire property. The miller had bought the right to the hay of certain fields for his horses, and Sibilet could not sell it except to him. The hay of all the fields in the district was sold at better prices than that of Les Aigues, though the yield of the latter was the best.

Langlume, then, became the provisional mayor; but in France the provisional is eternal,--though Frenchmen are suspected of loving