Today's Stichomancy for Hugo Chavez

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood by Howard Pyle:

On golden helms and greaves.

"But suddenly a silence came About the Table Round, For up the hall there walked a dame Bent nigh unto the ground.

"Her nose was hooked, her eyes were bleared, Her locks were lank and white; Upon her chin there grew a beard; She was a gruesome sight.

"And so with crawling step she came And kneeled at Arthur's feet;

The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from La Grenadiere by Honore de Balzac:

babyhood), so their mother talked to them in both languages; directing the bent of their childish minds with admirable skill, admitting no fallacious reasoning, no bad principle. She ruled by kindness, concealing nothing, explaining everything. If Louis wished for books, she was careful to give him interesting yet accurate books--books of biography, the lives of great seamen, great captains, and famous men, for little incidents in their history gave her numberless opportunities of explaining the world and life to her children. She would point out the ways in which men, really great in themselves, had risen from obscurity; how they had started from the lowest ranks of society, with no one to look to but themselves, and achieved noble

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

works it that his tillage only brings him loss?

Crit. True; mother earth herself is not a source of wealth to us if, instead of helping us to live, she helps us to starve.

Soc. And by a parity of reasoning, sheep and cattle may fail of being wealth if, through want of knowledge how to treat them, their owner loses by them; to him at any rate the sheep and the cattle are not wealth?

Crit. That is the conclusion I draw.

Soc. It appears, you hold to the position that wealth consists of things which benefit, while things which injure are not wealth?

Crit. Just so.

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 Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson:

disgust for him being one of the small, efficient motives in the story. Now it would have taken a fairish dose to disgust Wiltshire. - Again, the idea of publishing the Beach substantively is dropped - at once, both on account of expostulation, and because it measured shorter than I had expected. And it was only taken up, when the proposed volume, BEACH DE MAR, petered out. It petered out thus: the chief of the short stories got sucked into SOPHIA SCARLET - and Sophia is a book I am much taken with, and mean to get to, as soon as - but not before - I have done DAVID BALFOUR and THE YOUNG CHEVALIER. So you see you are like to hear no