| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Vailima Letters by Robert Louis Stevenson: of the cattle. The cattle are Jack, my horse, quite
converted, my wife rides him now, and he is as steady as a
doctor's cob; Tifaga Jack, a circus horse, my mother's
piebald, bought from a passing circus; Belle's mare, now in
childbed or next door, confound the slut! Musu - amusingly
translated the other day 'don't want to,' literally cross,
but always in the sense of stubbornness and resistance - my
wife's little dark-brown mare, with a white star on her
forehead, whom I have been riding of late to steady her - she
has no vices, but is unused, skittish and uneasy, and wants a
lot of attention and humouring; lastly (of saddle horses)
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: I ruined myself. I lost all my fortune. Then the longing to see Bianca
once more possessed me like a frenzy. I stole back to Venice and found
her again. For six months I was happy; she hid me in her house and fed
me. I thought thus deliciously to finish my days. But the Provveditore
courted her, and guessed that he had a rival; we in Italy can feel
that. He played the spy upon us, and surprised us together in bed,
base wretch. You may judge what a fight for life it was; I did not
kill him outright, but I wounded him dangerously.
"That adventure broke my luck. I have never found another Bianca; I
have known great pleasures; but among the most celebrated women at the
court of Louis XV. I never found my beloved Venetian's charm, her
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| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from A Drama on the Seashore by Honore de Balzac: We nodded consent, and he ran off joyfully toward the town. This
meeting maintained us in our previous mental condition; but it
lessened our gay lightheartedness.
"Poor man!" said Pauline, with that accent which removes from the
compassion of a woman all that is mortifying in human pity, "ought we
not to feel ashamed of our happiness in presence of such misery?"
"Nothing is so cruelly painful as to have powerless desires," I
answered. "Those two poor creatures, the father and son, will never
know how keen our sympathy for them is, any more than the world will
know how beautiful are their lives; they are laying up their treasures
in heaven."
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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 Adventure by Jack London: diving among the hungry ground-sharks and contesting with them for
possession of the stunned prey, until he earned the approval of the
whole Tahitian crew. Arahu challenged him to tear a fish from a
shark's jaws, leaving half to the shark and bringing the other half
himself to the surface; and Tudor performed the feat, a flip from
the sandpaper hide of the astonished shark scraping several inches
of skin from his shoulder. And Joan was delighted, while Sheldon,
looking on, realized that here was the hero of her adventure-dreams
coming true. She did not care for love, but he felt that if ever
she did love it would be that sort of a man--"a man who exhibited,"
was his way of putting it.
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