| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Ruling Passion by Henry van Dyke: fleece like a merino ram. But under this coat of innocence he
carried a heart so black that he would bite while he was wagging his
tail. This smooth devil, and his four followers like unto himself,
had sworn relentless hatred to Pichou, and they made his life
difficult.
But his great and sufficient consolation for all toils and troubles
was the friendship with his master. In the long summer evenings,
when Dan Scott was making up his accounts in the store, or studying
his pocket cyclopaedia of medicine in the living-room of the Post,
with its low beams and mysterious green-painted cupboards, Pichou
would lie contentedly at his feet. In the frosty autumnal mornings,
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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 Recruit by Honore de Balzac: the countess was obliged to return to her room. Brigitte, who watched
her movements, was uneasy when she did not reappear, and entering the
room she found her dead.
"She must have heard that recruit walking about Monsieur Auguste's
room, and singing their damned Marseillaise, as if he were in a
stable," cried Brigitte. "That was enough to kill her!"
The death of the countess had a far more solemn cause; it resulted, no
doubt, from an awful vision. At the exact hour when Madame de Dey died
at Carentan, her son was shot in the Morbihan. That tragic fact may be
added to many recorded observations on sympathies that are known to
ignore the laws of space: records which men of solitude are collecting
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