| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from St. Ives by Robert Louis Stevenson: apt to give, by way of a rebuke, when the Major wearied us beyond
endurance with dispraises of the English. This was an account of
the BRAVES GENS with whom he had been boarding. True enough, he
was a man so simple and grateful by nature, that the most common
civilities were able to touch him to the heart, and would remain
written in his memory; but from a thousand inconsiderable but
conclusive indications, I gathered that this family had really
loved him, and loaded him with kindness. They made a fire in his
bedroom, which the sons and daughters tended with their own hands;
letters from France were looked for with scarce more eagerness by
himself than by these alien sympathisers; when they came, he would
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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 Sportsman by Xenophon: the short cuts, running chiefly up steeps or across flats, over
inequalities unequally, and downhill scarcely at all.
[29] Or, "shifts her ground."
[30] Or, "in their terror not of dogs only, but of eagles, since up to
a year old they are liable to be seized by these birds of prey
while crossing some bottom or bare ground, while if bigger . . ."
[31] {oi . . . planetai}, see Ael. op. cit. xiii. 14.
Whilst being hunted they are most visible in crossing ground that has
been turned up by the plough, if, that is, they have any trace of red
about them, or through stubble, owing to reflection. So, too, they are
visible enough on beaten paths or roads, presuming these are fairly
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