Today's Stichomancy for Nick Lachey

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Snow Image by Nathaniel Hawthorne:

say, so I'll take my turn. My story will cut but a poor figure by the side of theirs; for I never supposed that I could have a right to meat and drink, and great praise besides, only for tagging rhymes together, as it seems this man does; nor ever tried to get the substance of hundreds into my own hands, like the trader there. When I was about of your years, I married me a wife,--just such a neat and pretty young woman as Miriam, if that's her name,--and all I asked of Providence was an ordinary blessing on the sweat of my brow, so that we might be decent and comfortable, and have daily bread for ourselves, and for some other little mouths that we soon had to feed. We had no very

The Snow Image

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Unseen World and Other Essays by John Fiske:

like fields of dried straw." Nevertheless, the government at Calcutta made--with one lamentable exception, hereafter to be noticed--no legislative attempt to meet the consequences of this dangerous condition of things. The administration of local affairs was still, at that date, intrusted to native officials. The whole internal regulation was in the hands of the famous Muhamad Reza Ehan. Hindu or Mussulman assessors pried into every barn and shrewdly estimated the probable dimensions of the crops on every field; and the courts, as well as the police, were still in native hands. "These men," says our author, "knew the country, its capabilities, its average yield, and its average

The Unseen World and Other Essays

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner:

Chapter 2.IV. Lyndall.

Chapter 2.V. Tant Sannie Holds An Upsitting, and Gregory Writes A Letter.

Chapter 2.VI. A Boer-wedding.

Chapter 2.VII. Waldo Goes Out to Taste Life, and Em Stays At Home and Tastes It.

Chapter 2.VIII. The Kopje.

Chapter 2.IX. Lyndall's Stranger.

Chapter 2.X. Gregory Rose Has An Idea.

Chapter 2.XI. An Unfinished Letter.

Chapter 2.XII. Gregory's Womanhood.

Chapter 2.XIII. Dreams.

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 United States Declaration of Independence:

where names appear on the documents [which names I have left out].

The resulting document has several misspellings removed from those parchment "facsimiles" I used back in 1971, and which I should not be able to easily find at this time, including "Brittain."

**The Project Gutenberg Etext of The Declaration of Independence**

#STARTMARK#

The Declaration of Independence of The United States of America

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and

United States Declaration of Independence