| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Gentle Grafter by O. Henry: speak two hours longer than Billy himself could on the silver
question. Finally, they persuaded me to take the gold cure.'
"'If you've got to get rid of your excess verbiage,' says I, 'why not
go out on the river bank and speak a piece? It seems to me there was
an old spell-binder named Cantharides that used to go and
disincorporate himself of his windy numbers along the seashore.'
"'No,' says Andy, 'I must have an audience. I feel like if I once
turned loose people would begin to call Senator Beveridge the Grand
Young Sphinx of the Wabash. I've got to get an audience together,
Jeff, and get this oral distension assuaged or it may turn in on me
and I'd go about feeling like a deckle-edge edition de luxe of Mrs. E.
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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 Foolish Virgin by Thomas Dixon: Still no answer.
"Hello! Hello!" he called loudly.
Someone stirred at the door. Jim's keen ear was
turned toward the house.
"I heard her bar the door, I'll swear it."
"How foolish, Jim!" Mary whispered. "You couldn't
have heard it."
"All the same I did. Here's a pretty kettle of
fish! The old hellion's not even going to let us in."
He seized the lever of his horn and blew one
terrific blast after another, in weird, uncanny
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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 Within the Tides by Joseph Conrad: waved them about. Then, catching sight of them, as it were, he
held them in front of his eyes, cursing and blaspheming and
bewailing his misfortune and his helplessness, till Niclaus quieted
him down.
"But it was his mind that planned out the affair and it was his
spirit which carried the other two on. Neither of them was of the
bold buccaneer type; and Fector, especially, had never in his
adventurous life used other weapons than slander and lies.
"That very evening they departed on a visit to Bamtz in Niclaus's
prau, which had been lying, emptied of her cargo of cocoanuts, for
a day or two under the canal bridge. They must have crossed the
Within the Tides |
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 Barnaby Rudge by Charles Dickens: roof, which hung in his room and had been cut asunder, no doubt by
the murderer, when he seized it.
'That was the bell I heard.
'A bureau was found opened, and a cash-box, which Mr Haredale had
brought down that day, and was supposed to contain a large sum of
money, was gone. The steward and gardener were both missing and
both suspected for a long time, but they were never found, though
hunted far and wide. And far enough they might have looked for
poor Mr Rudge the steward, whose body--scarcely to be recognised by
his clothes and the watch and ring he wore--was found, months
afterwards, at the bottom of a piece of water in the grounds, with
Barnaby Rudge |
