| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Jolly Corner by Henry James: comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start
that often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of
having ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the
door in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he
now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the one not directly facing
it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would
have admitted him to the last room of the four, the room without
other approach or egress, had it not, to his intimate conviction,
been closed SINCE his former visitation, the matter probably of a
quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his eyes at the
wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding
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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 Purse by Honore de Balzac: whether he made some ill-judged movement, believing himself to be
on the floor--the event did not allow of his remembering exactly
the cause of his accident--he fell, his head struck a footstool,
he lost consciousness and lay motionless during a space of time
of which he knew not the length.
A sweet voice roused him from the stunned condition into which he
had sunk. When he opened his eyes the flash of a bright light
made him close them again immediately; but through the mist that
veiled his senses he heard the whispering of two women, and felt
two young, two timid hands on which his head was resting. He soon
recovered consciousness, and by the light of an old-fashioned
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