| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke: leaves of the book in memory of Sheila.
II.
COMMON HEATHER.
It is not half as far from Albany to Aberdeen as it is from New
York to London. In fact, I venture to say that an American on foot
will find himself less a foreigner in Scotland than in any other
country in the Old World. There is something warm and hospitable--
if he knew the language well enough he would call it couthy--in the
greeting that he gets from the shepherd on the moor, and the
conversation that he holds with the farmer's wife in the stone
cottage, where he stops to ask for a drink of milk and a bit 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 Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: when Fashion puts on constitutional airs and gives promotion for age.
But in this case Fashion had done as the world did, and accepted
Madame d'Espard as still young.
The Marquise, who was thirty-three by her register of birth, was
twenty-two in a drawing-room in the evening. But by what care, what
artifice! Elaborate curls shaded her temples. She condemned herself to
live in twilight, affecting illness so as to sit under the protecting
tones of light filtered through muslin. Like Diane de Poitiers, she
used cold water in her bath, and, like her again, the Marquise slept
on a horse-hair mattress, with morocco-covered pillows to preserve her
hair; she ate very little, only drank water, and observed monastic
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