| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mucker by Edgar Rice Burroughs: himself from another man--when she had struck, Billy had
struck back; the only thing to his credit being that he never
had struck her except in self-defense. Chastity in woman was
to him a thing to joke of--he did not believe that it existed;
for he judged other women by the one he knew best--his
mother. And as he hated her, so he hated them all. He had
doubly hated Barbara Harding since she not only was a
woman, but a woman of the class he loathed.
And so it was strange and inexplicable that the suggestion
of the girl's probable fate should have affected Billy Byrne as
it did. He did not stop to reason about it at all--he simply
The Mucker |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling: excessively unstuffed and limp. Preponderance of individuality
was ever a bar to foreign travel. That pig could have been in
case to visit you in India had he not parted with some of his
most cherished notions.
The dissecting part impressed me not so much as the slaying.
They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were
so excessively dead, and the man in the dripping, clammy, not
passage did not seem to care, and ere the blood of such a one had
ceased to foam on the floor, such another and four friends with
him had shrieked and died. But a pig is only the unclean
animal--the forbidden of the prophet.
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