Today's Stichomancy for Ulysses S. Grant

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from A Child's Garden of Verses by Robert Louis Stevenson:

Had blown out the light!

Patience, children, just a minute-- See the spreading circles die; The stream and all in it Will clear by-and-by.

XXXVI Fairy Bread

Come up here, O dusty feet! Here is fairy bread to eat. Here in my retiring room, Children, you may dine

A Child's Garden of Verses

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from American Notes by Rudyard Kipling:

affair of the North and South, the regular army would be swamped in the mass of militia and armed volunteers would turn the land into a hell.

Yet the authorities persist in regarding an external war as a thing to be seriously considered.

The Power that would disembark troops on American soil would be capable of heaving a shovelful of mud into the Atlantic in the hope of filling it up. Consequently, the authorities are fascinated with the idea of the sliding scale or concertina army. This is an hereditary instinct, for you know that when we English have got together two companies, one machine gun, a sick bullock,

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Lamentable Tragedy of Locrine and Mucedorus by William Shakespeare:

Amadine and the shepherd?

MOUSE. And I have been through the woods, and through the woods, and could see nothing but an emet.

ROMBELO. Why, I see thousand emets; thou meanest a little one?

MOUSE. Nay, that emet that I saw was bigger than thou art.

ROMBELO. Bigger than I? what a fool have you to your man: I pray you, master, turn him away.

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 Complete Poems of Longfellow by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

If I have spoken evil, Bear witness of the evil; but if well, Why smitest thou me?

CAIAPHAS. Where are the witnesses? Let them say what they know.

THE TWO FALSE WITNESSES. We heard him say: I will destroy this Temple made with hands, And will within three days build up another Made without hands.