| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The King of the Golden River by John Ruskin: asked for it. Then Gluck took some bread in his basket, and the
bottle of water, and set off very early for the mountains.
If the glacier had occasioned a great deal of fatigue in his
brothers, it was twenty times worse for him, who was neither so
strong nor so practiced on the mountains. He had several very bad
falls, lost his basket and bread, and was very much frightened at
the strange noises under the ice. He lay a long time to rest on the
grass, after he had got over, and began to climb the hill just in
the hottest part of the clay. When he had climbed for an hour, he
got dreadfully thirsty and was going to drink like his brothers,
when he saw an old man coming down the path above him, looking very
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Great Big Treasury of Beatrix Potter by Beatrix Potter: Kitten into a hot bath to get the butter
off.
John Joiner smelt the pudding; but
he regretted that he had not time to
stay to dinner, because he had just
finished making a wheelbarrow for
Miss Potter, and she had ordered two
hen coops.
And when I was going to the post
late in the afternoon--I looked up the
land from the corner, and I saw Mr.
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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 An Unsocial Socialist by George Bernard Shaw: you some day. The future husband to be contradicted may be Sidney
Trefusis. Ha! ha! ha!" Sir Charles had emptied a second large
goblet of wine, and was a little flushed and boisterous.
"No," said Trefusis, "I have had enough of love myself, and am
not likely to inspire it. Women do not care for men to whom, as
Erskine says, everything is a question of figures. I used to
flirt with women; now I lecture them, and abhor a man-flirt worse
than I do a woman one. Some more wine? Oh, you must not waste the
remainder of this bottle."
"I think we had better go, Brandon," said Erskine, his mistrust
of Trefusis growing. "We promised to be back before two."
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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 Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: "No," persisted Madame Dupont, "I tell you--she has got a cold in
her head, and she has an eruption at the back of the throat."
"Well," cried the nurse, angrily, "if she has, it's because the
doctor scratched her with that spoon he put into her mouth wrong
end first! A cold in the head? Yes, that's true; but if she has
caught cold, I can't say when, I don't know anything about it--
nothing, nothing at all. I have always kept her well covered;
she's always had as much as three covers on her. The truth is,
it was when you came, the time before last; you were all the time
insisting upon opening the windows in the house!"
"But once more I tell you," cried Madame Dupont, "we are not
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