| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: used elsewhere, and so will not repeat here.[4]
[4] See especially Jackson Himes in The Blazed Trail;
and TheRawhide.
This vividness manifests itself quite as often in the
selection of the apt word as in the construction of
elaborate phrases with a half-humorous intention. A
cowboy once told me of the arrival of a tramp by
saying, "He SIFTED into camp." Could any verb be
more expressive? Does not it convey exactly the
lazy, careless, out-at-heels shuffling gait of the hobo?
Another in the course of description told of a saloon
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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 Under the Andes by Rex Stout: No time then for the decencies; we had work to do, and we
crushed and pounded their lives out against the stone floor. There
had not been a sound. They quivered and lay still; and then,
looking up at some slight sound in the doorway, we saw Desiree.
She stood in the doorway, regarding us with an expression of
terror that I did not at first understand; then suddenly I realized
that, having seen us disappear beneath the surface of the take
after our dive from the column, she had thought us dead.
"Bon Dieu!" she exclaimed in a hollow voice of horror.
"This, too! Do you come, messieurs?"
"For you," I answered. "We are flesh and bone, Desiree,
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