| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from My Aunt Margaret's Mirror by Walter Scott: very little embellishment, of a story that I remembered being
struck with in my childhood, when told at the fireside by a lady
of eminent virtues and no inconsiderable share of talent, one of
the ancient and honourable house of Swinton. She was a kind of
relation of my own, and met her death in a manner so shocking--
being killed, in a fit of insanity, by a female attendant who had
been attached to her person for half a lifetime--that I cannot
now recall her memory, child as I was when the catastrophe
occurred, without a painful reawakening of perhaps the first
images of horror that the scenes of real life stamped on my mind.
This good spinster had in her composition a strong vein of the
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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 Wife, et al by Anton Chekhov: the ikon in the corner, buzzing, and one could hear the
cockroaches scurrying about among the thick portfolios under the
seats. . . .
Ryabovsky came home as the sun was setting. He flung his cap on
the table, and, without removing his muddy boots, sank pale and
exhausted on the bench and closed his eyes.
"I am tired . . ." he said, and twitched his eyebrows, trying to
raise his eyelids.
To be nice to him and to show she was not cross, Olga Ivanovna
went up to him, gave him a silent kiss, and passed the comb
through his fair hair. She meant to comb it for him.
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