Today's Stichomancy for Robert Frost

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Rezanov by Gertrude Atherton:

senorita. You will go with him, far away to the north and the snow. These others never could win your heart; but this man who looks like a king, and as if many women had loved him, and he had cared little-- Oh, senorita, Carlos was only a poor In- dian, but the men that women love all have some- thing that makes them brothers--the Great Rus- sian and the poor man who goes mad for a moment and kills one woman that he may live with another forever. The great Russian is free, but he is the same, senorita--he too could kill for love, and such

Rezanov

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The People That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

further refreshed. I shook Ajor gently by the shoulder; but she did not open her eyes, and then I gathered a few drops of water in my cupped palm and let them trickle between her lips. This revived her so that she raised her lids, and when she saw me, she smiled.

"What happened?" she asked. "Where are we?"

"We are at the end of the corridor," I replied, and daylight is coming in from the outside world just ahead. We are saved, Ajor!"

She sat up then and looked about, and then, quite womanlike, she burst into tears. It was the reaction, of course; and then too, she was very weak. I took her in my arms and quieted her

The People That Time Forgot

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton:

and pearl-grey gloves with black stitchings grasped in his left hand, he stood looking at the door of the church.

Overhead, Handel's March swelled pompously through the imitation stone vaulting, carrying on its waves the faded drift of the many weddings at which, with cheerful indifference, he had stood on the same chancel step watching other brides float up the nave toward other bridegrooms.

"How like a first night at the Opera!" he thought, recognising all the same faces in the same boxes (no,

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 Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells:

and saw close to me a dim pinkish thing, looking more like a flayed child than anything else in the world. The creature had exactly the mild but repulsive features of a sloth, the same low forehead and slow gestures.

As the first shock of the change of light passed, I saw about me more distinctly. The little sloth-like creature was standing and staring at me. My conductor had vanished. The place was a narrow passage between high walls of lava, a crack in the knotted rock, and on either side interwoven heaps of sea-mat, palm-fans, and reeds leaning against the rock formed rough and impenetrably dark dens. The winding way up the ravine between these was scarcely three yards wide,

The Island of Doctor Moreau