Today's Stichomancy for Yoshitaka Amano

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Records of a Family of Engineers by Robert Louis Stevenson:

strike work, a sea would come rolling over the rocks, dash out the fire, and endanger his indispensable implement, the bellows. If the sea was smooth, while the smith often stood at work knee-deep in water, the tide rose by imperceptible degrees, first cooling the exterior of the fireplace, or hearth, and then quietly blackening and extinguishing the fire from below. The writer has frequently been amused at the perplexing anxiety of the blacksmith when coaxing his fire and endeavouring to avert the effects of the rising tide.

[Friday, 21st Aug.]

Everything connected with the forge being now completed,

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

Hysterical Passion. It may be - it may be.'

'That's as may be,' said Puck. They heard him turn the hay. 'Why, your hay is half hedge-brishings,' he said. 'You don't expect a horse to thrive on oak and ash and thorn leaves, do you?'

Ping-ping-ping went the bicycle bell round the corner. Nurse was coming back from the mill.

'Is it all right?' Una called.

'All quite right,' Nurse called back. 'They're to be christened next Sunday.'

'What? What?' They both leaned forward across the half-door. it could not have been properly fastened, for it opened, and tilted

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

Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although I know my years be past the best, I smiling credit her false-speaking tongue, Outfacing faults in love with love's ill rest. But wherefore says my love that she is young? And wherefore say not I that I am old? O, love's best habit is a soothing tongue, And age, in love, loves not to have years told. Therefore, I'll lie with love, and love with me, Since that our faults in love thus smother'd be.

II.

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 A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac:

the fickleness of women. If we are inconstant, /you/ are strangely capricious. You take away the hours of love that made a poor creature's happiness for ten whole days; the hours on which she drew to be charming and kind to all that came to see her! After all, you were the source of my kindness to /him/; you do not know what pain you give him. I wonder what I must do to keep you, or simply to keep the right to be yours sometimes. . . . When I think that you never would come here to me! . . . With what delicious emotion I would wait upon you!--There are other women more favored than I. There are women to whom you say, 'I love you.' To me you have never said more than 'You are a good girl.' Certain speeches