| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: local German success. Overnight they had killed a gendarme.
There is to be a public funeral and much ceremony. It is rare
for anyone now to get killed; everything is so systematised.
You may buy postcards with views of the destruction at various
angles, and send them off with the Arras postmark. The town is
not without a certain business activity. There is, I am told, a
considerable influx of visitors of a special sort; they wear
khaki and lead the troglodytic life. They play cards and gossip
and sleep in the shadows, and may not walk the streets. I had
one glimpse of a dark crowded cellar. Now and then one sees a
British soldier on some special errand; he keeps to the pavement,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Black Arrow by Robert Louis Stevenson: fought at all) without guidance. That was perhaps the chief cause
of the disaster which made haste to follow.
At the shore end of the pier, for perhaps a minute, Dick held his
own with a handful; one or two were wounded upon either side; steel
crossed steel; nor had there been the least signal of advantage,
when in the twinkling of an eye the tide turned against the party
from the ship. Someone cried out that all was lost; the men were
in the very humour to lend an ear to a discomfortable counsel; the
cry was taken up. "On board, lads, for your lives!" cried another.
A third, with the true instinct of the coward, raised that
inevitable report on all retreats: "We are betrayed!" And in a
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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 The Faith of Men by Jack London: native wife, and, by reason of the connubial bliss that followed,
he escaped the unrest and vain longings that curse the days of more
fastidious men, spoil their work, and conquer them in the end. He
lived contentedly, was at single purposes with the business he was
set there to do, and achieved a brilliant record in the service of
the Company. About this time his wife died, was claimed by her
people, and buried with savage circumstance in a tin trunk in the
top of a tree.
Two sons she had borne him, and when the Company promoted him, he
journeyed with them still deeper into the vastness of the North-
West Territory to a place called Sin Rock, where he took charge of
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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 The Market-Place by Harold Frederic: had never wanted to sit down so much before in his life--and
he turned on his heel in the wet grass with a grunt of displeasure.
This mood vanished utterly a few moments later.
The remote sounds had begun to come to him, of boys
shouting and dogs barking, in the recesses of the strip
of woodland which the lane skirted, and at these he hastened
back to his post. It did not seem to him a good place,
and when he heard the reports of guns to right and left
of him, and nothing came his way, he liked it less
than ever; it had become a matter of offended pride
with him, however, to relieve the keeper of no atom
The Market-Place |
