| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Mountains by Stewart Edward White: 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
scene, "They all BELLIED UP TO the bar." Again, a
range cook, objecting to purposeless idling about his
fire, shouted: "If you fellows come MOPING around
here any more, I'LL SURE MAKE YOU HARD TO CATCH!"
"Fish in that pond, son? Why, there's some fish
in there big enough to rope," another advised me.
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from War and the Future by H. G. Wells: number more than a thousand or so, all three of our western
allied countries. The mass of the stop-the-war people is made up
quite other elements.
2
In the complex structure of the modern community there are two
groups or strata or pockets in which the impulse of social
obligation, the gregarious sense of a common welfare, is at its
lowest; one of these is the class of the Resentful Employee, the
class of people who, without explanation, adequate preparation or
any chance, have been shoved at an early age into uncongenial
work and never given a chance to escape, and the other is the
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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 Options by O. Henry: and--"
"I'm not that way," interrupted Chloe. "I mean what I say. It isn't
the big things that are done in the world, Tommy, that count with a
woman. When the knights were riding abroad in their armor to slay
dragons, many a stay-at-home page won a lonesome lady's hand by being
on the spot to pick up her glove and be quick with her cloak when the
wind blew. The man I am to like best, whoever he shall be, must show
his love in little ways. He must never forget, after hearing it once,
that I do not like to have any one walk at my left side; that I detest
bright-colored neckties; that I prefer to sit with my back to a light;
that I like candied violets; that I must not be talked to when I am
Options |
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 Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: so. Some dogs - some, at the very least - if they be kept separate
from others, remain quite natural; and these, when at length they
meet with a companion of experience, and have the game explained to
them, distinguish themselves by the severity of their devotion to
its rules. I wish I were allowed to tell a story which would
radiantly illuminate the point; but men, like dogs, have an
elaborate and mysterious etiquette. It is their bond of sympathy
that both are the children of convention.
The person, man or dog, who has a conscience is eternally condemned
to some degree of humbug; the sense of the law in their members
fatally precipitates either towards a frozen and affected bearing.
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