| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Astoria by Washington Irving: securing his own passage through their country by pretending that
he, with whom they were accustomed to trade, was on his way to
them with a plentiful supply of goods. He feared, too, that
Crooks and M'Lellan would take this opportunity to retort upon
him the perfidy which they accused him of having used, two years
previously, among these very Sioux. In this respect, however, he
did them signal injustice. There was no such thing as court
design or treachery in their thought; but M'Lellan, when he heard
that Lisa was on his way up the river, renewed his open threat of
shooting him the moment he met him on Indian land.
The representations made by Crooks and M'Lellan of the treachery
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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 Glasses by Henry James: I even before he quitted me asked him to promise me this. "All
right, I promise"--but he was gloomy enough. He was a lover facing
the fact that there was no limit to the deceit his loved one was
ready to practise: it made so remarkably little difference. I
could see by what a stretch his passionate pity would from this
moment overlook the girl's fatuity and folly. She was always
accessible to him--that I knew; for if she had told him he was an
idiot to dream she could dream of him, she would have rebuked the
imputation of having failed to make it clear that she would always
be glad to regard him as a friend. What were most of her friends--
what were all of them--but repudiated idiots? I was perfectly
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