| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The War in the Air by H. G. Wells: Official-looking persons had signalled to him by means of flag
flapping and arm waving. On the whole a guttural variant of
English prevailed in the sentences that alighted upon the
balloon; chiefly he was told to "gome down or you will be shot."
"All very well," said Bert, "but 'ow?"
Then they shot a little wide of the car. Latterly he had been
shot at six or seven times, and once the bullet had gone by with
a sound so persuasively like the tearing of silk that he had
resigned himself to the prospect of a headlong fall. But either
they were aiming near him or they had missed, and as yet nothing
was torn but the air about him--and his anxious soul.
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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 Beast in the Jungle by Henry James: so successfully cultivated and to which our whole account of him is
a reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as
they were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken
about him, even to the point of making him ask himself if he were,
by any chance, of a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or
reach, within the immediate jurisdiction, of the thing that waited.
When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to
him her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the
shadow of a change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began
to imagine aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of
her peril as the direct menace for himself of personal privation.
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