Today's Stichomancy for Charles Bronson

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy:

and began throwing up the bundles himself. "Rather than you should do it I will," he said. "But the men will be here directly. Why, Marty!--whatever has happened to your head? Lord, it has shrunk to nothing--it looks an apple upon a gate-post!"

Her heart swelled, and she could not speak. At length she managed to groan, looking on the ground, "I've made myself ugly--and hateful--that's what I've done!"

"No, no," he answered. "You've only cut your hair--I see now.

"Then why must you needs say that about apples and gate-posts?"

"Let me see."

"No, no!" She ran off into the gloom of the sluggish dawn. He did

The Woodlanders

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells:

makes it very clear that he considers the fighting of the Middle Ages, though frequent and bloody, to be a confused, mobbing sort of affair, and politically and technically unsatisfactory. The knight was an egotist in armour. Machiavelli does small justice to the English bowmen. It is interesting to note that Switzerland, that present island of peace, was regarded by him as the mother of modern war. Swiss aggression was the curse of the Milanese. That is a remark by the way; our interest here is to note that modern war emerges upon history as the sixteenth century unfolds, as an affair in which the essential factor is the drilled and trained infantryman. The artillery is developing

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Cratylus by Plato:

Necessarily the pictorial image becomes less vivid, while the association of the nature and habits of the animal is more distinctly perceived. The picture passes into a symbol, for there would be too many of them and they would crowd the mind; the vocal imitation, too, is always in process of being lost and being renewed, just as the picture is brought back again in the description of the poet. Words now can be used more freely because there are more of them. What was once an involuntary expression becomes voluntary. Not only can men utter a cry or call, but they can communicate and converse; they can not only use words, but they can even play with them. The word is separated both from the object and from the mind; and slowly nations and individuals attain to a fuller consciousness of

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 Breaking Point by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

"I can't act, Nina. I do go about."

And Nina had a softened moment.

"Don't think about him," she said. "He isn't sick, or he would have had some one wire or write, and he isn't dead, or they'd have found his papers and let us know."

"Then he's in some sort of trouble. I want to go out there. I want to go out there!"

That, indeed, had been her constant cry for the last two weeks. She would have done it probably, packed her bag and slipped away, but she had no money of her own, and even Leslie, to whom she appealed, had refused her when he knew her purpose.

The Breaking Point