Today's Stichomancy for John D. Rockefeller

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery:

thought she'd likely be an authority on the subject, having so many sisters married. Ruby told me she was hid in the hall pantry when Malcolm Andres proposed to her sister Susan. She said Malcolm told Susan that his dad had given him the farm in his own name and then said, `What do you say, darling pet, if we get hitched this fall?' And Susan said, `Yes--no--I don't know--let me see'--and there they were, engaged as quick as that. But I didn't think that sort of a proposal was a very romantic one, so in the end I had to imagine it out as well as I could. I made it very flowery and poetical and Bertram went on his knees, although Ruby Gillis says it isn't done nowadays. Geraldine

Anne of Green Gables

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Where There's A Will by Mary Roberts Rinehart:

Nobody could think of anything to say. "That is," she went on, "I believe there is a wife. Good heavens, Dicky, it isn't Minnie?"

He stepped aside at that, disclosing Mrs. Dick on her box, with her childish eyes wide open.

"There--there IS a wife, Julia," he said. "This is her--she."

Well, she'd come out to make mischief--it was written all over her when she came in the door, but when Mr. Dick presented his wife, frightened as he was and still proud of her, and Mrs. Dick smiled in her pretty way, Miss Summers just walked across and looked down at her with a queer look on her face. I shut my eyes

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Tono Bungay by H. G. Wells:

Deflated?"

"Just about quarter full. That last oil glaze of yours holds the gas something beautiful. He's not lost a cubic metre a week."...

Cothope returned to Socialism as we went toward the sheds.

"Glad to think you're a Socialist, sir," he said, "it's the only civilised state. I been a Socialist some years--off the Clarion. It's a rotten scramble, this world. It takes the things we make and invent and it plays the silly fool with 'em. We scientific people, we'll have to take things over and stop all this financing and advertisement and that. It's too silly. It's a noosance. Look at us!"

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 An Historical Mystery by Honore de Balzac:

closely on his heels," said the abbe.

At those words the two men looked at each other, and all was said. Each belonged to those profound anatomists of thought to whom a mere inflexion of the voice, a look, a word suffices to reveal a soul, just as the Indians track their enemies by signs invisible to European eyes.

"I expected to draw something out of him, and I have only betrayed myself," thought Corentin.

"Ha! the sly rogue!" thought the priest.

Midnight rang from the old church clock just as Corentin and the abbe re-entered the salon. The opening and shutting of doors and closets