| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tales and Fantasies by Robert Louis Stevenson: her grave at midnight and carried, dead and naked, to that
far-away city that she had always honoured with her Sunday's
best; the place beside her family was to be empty till the
crack of doom; her innocent and almost venerable members to
be exposed to that last curiosity of the anatomist.
Late one afternoon the pair set forth, well wrapped in cloaks
and furnished with a formidable bottle. It rained without
remission - a cold, dense, lashing rain. Now and again there
blew a puff of wind, but these sheets of falling water kept
it down. Bottle and all, it was a sad and silent drive as
far as Penicuik, where they were to spend the evening. They
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Distinguished Provincial at Paris by Honore de Balzac: "Poor as Job," said Lucien.
"It is a great temptation for some of us," said the actress.
Just then the author of the play suddenly entered, and Lucien beheld
M. du Bruel, a short, attenuated young man in an overcoat, a composite
human blend of the jack-in-office, the owner of house-property, and
the stockbroker.
"Florine, child," said this personage, "are you sure of your part, eh?
No slips of memory, you know. And mind that scene in the second act,
make the irony tell, bring out that subtle touch; say, 'I do not love
you,' just as we agreed."
"Why do you take parts in which you have to say such things?" asked
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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 Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: like mushrooms; the pleasant hills are loaded with them,
each impudently squatted in its garden, each roofed and
carrying chimneys like a house. And yet a glance of an
eye discovers their true character. They are not houses;
for they were not designed with a view to human
habitation, and the internal arrangements are, as they
tell me, fantastically unsuited to the needs of man.
They are not buildings; for you can scarcely say a thing
is built where every measurement is in clamant
disproportion with its neighbour. They belong to no
style of art, only to a form of business much to be
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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 Long Odds by H. Rider Haggard: yards. I never saw a more splendid sight in all my hunting experience
than those four lions bounding across the veldt, overshadowed by the
dense pall of smoke and backed by the fiery furnace of the burning
reeds.
"I reckoned that they would pass, on their way to the bushy kloof,
within about five and twenty yards of me, so, taking a long breath, I
got my gun well on to the lion's shoulder--the black-maned one--so as to
allow for an inch or two of motion, and catch him through the heart. I
was on, dead on, and my finger was just beginning to tighten on the
trigger, when suddenly I went blind--a bit of reed-ash had drifted into
my right eye. I danced and rubbed, and succeeded in clearing it more or
Long Odds |
