| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: world's beauty relieves a mind from morbid thoughts.
I shall never forget one visit. It was a grey,
dropping day; the grass was strung with rain-drops; and
the people in the houses kept hanging out their shirts
and petticoats and angrily taking them in again, as the
weather turned from wet to fair and back again. A grave-
digger, and a friend of his, a gardener from the country,
accompanied me into one after another of the cells and
little courtyards in which it gratified the wealthy of
old days to enclose their old bones from neighbourhood.
In one, under a sort of shrine, we found a forlorn human
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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 Cruise of the Jasper B. by Don Marquis: creeping over the stern of the Jasper B. had by any chance
succeeded in purloining the box. He was alone, but he attempted
to come to the assistance of his two followers even as we made
them prisoners. In fact, we exchanged shots."
The great detective made little of the danger he had encountered.
Indeed, his smile became one of amusement as he removed his coat,
rolled up his shirt sleeves, and exhibited a bandaged wound in
the fleshy part of his arm.
"It is only a slight wound," he said, beaming on it as if wounds
were quite delightful affairs, "and scarcely inconveniences me."
Barton Ward and Watson Bard, with their sleeves rolled up, were
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