| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Troll Garden and Selected Stories by Willa Cather: a muscle of their face. Though he usually smiled at passages that
seemed not at all funny to the child, she always laughed gleefully,
because he was so seldom moved to mirth that any such demonstration
delighted her and she took the credit of it entirely to herself Her
own inclination had been for serious stories, with sad endings,
like the Little Mermaid, which he had once told her in an unguarded
moment when she had a cold, and was put to bed early on her
birthday night and cried because she could not have her party. But
he highly disapproved of this preference, and had called it a
morbid taste, and always shook his finger at her when she asked for
the story. When she had been particularly good, or particularly
The Troll Garden and Selected Stories |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Dynamiter by Robert Louis Stevenson and Fanny Van De Grift Stevenson: garden, their conversation, clearly audible to me, was of so
startling a nature that it held me enthralled where I lay.
'The blow has come,' my father said, after a long pause.
I could hear my mother start and turn, but in words she made
no reply.
'Yes,' continued my father, 'I have received to-day a list of
all that I possess; of all, I say; of what I have lent
privately to men whose lips are sealed with terror; of what I
have buried with my own hand on the bare mountain, when there
was not a bird in heaven. Does the air, then, carry secrets?
Are the hills of glass? Do the stones we tread upon preserve
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