| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne: musing within himself about the hardships of matrimony, as my mother broke
silence.--
'--My brother Toby,' quoth she, 'is going to be married to Mrs. Wadman.'
--Then he will never, quoth my father, be able to lie diagonally in his bed
again as long as he lives.
It was a consuming vexation to my father, that my mother never asked the
meaning of a thing she did not understand.
--That she is not a woman of science, my father would say--is her
misfortune--but she might ask a question.--
My mother never did.--In short, she went out of the world at last without
knowing whether it turned round, or stood still.--My father had officiously
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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 Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: commonplace, to give a kindly thought now and then to the long
chain of human workers through whose hands the timber of his house
has passed, since it first felt the stroke of the axe in the snow-
bound winter woods, and floated, through the spring and summer, on
far-off lakes and little rivers, au large.
1894.
TROUT-FISHING IN THE TRAUN
"Those who wish to forget painful thoughts do well to absent
themselves for a time from the ties and objects that recall them;
but we can be said only to fulfil our destiny in the place that
gave us birth. I should on this account like well enough to spend
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