| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dust by Mr. And Mrs. Haldeman-Julius: women are like that, and men, too. But I wasn't. Life to me has
always been a strange world that I never got over thinking about
and trying to understand, and at the same time hustling to get
through with every day of it as fast as I could by keeping at the
only thing I knew which would make it all more bearable. There's
a lot of pain in work, but it's only of the muscles and my pain
has always been in the things I've thought about. The awful waste
and futility of it all! Take this farm--I came here when this was
hardly more than a desert. You ought to have seen how thick the
dust was the first day we got down here. And I've built up this
place. You've helped me. Bill didn't care for it--even if he had
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Island Nights' Entertainments by Robert Louis Stevenson: sign is neither good nor bad. But if the bottle be full of gin,
the gin is bad; and if the sign be made in idolatry bad, so is the
idolatry.' And, very like a native pastor, he had a text apposite
about the casting out of devils.
"'And who has been telling you about the Evil Eye?' I asked.
"He admitted it was Case. Now, I am afraid you will think me very
narrow, Mr. Wiltshire, but I must tell you I was displeased, and
cannot think a trader at all a good man to advise or have an
influence upon my pastors. And, besides, there had been some
flying talk in the country of old Adams and his being poisoned, to
which I had paid no great heed; but it came back to me at the
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