| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: which they occupy, and are always free to leave it, they think of
nothing but the means of changing their fortune, or of increasing
it. To minds thus predisposed, every new method which leads by a
shorter road to wealth, every machine which spares labor, every
instrument which diminishes the cost of production, every
discovery which facilitates pleasures or augments them, seems to
be the grandest effort of the human intellect. It is chiefly
from these motives that a democratic people addicts itself to
scientific pursuits - that it understands, and that it respects
them. In aristocratic ages, science is more particularly called
upon to furnish gratification to the mind; in democracies, to the
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Tom Grogan by F. Hopkinson Smith: question. He waited a moment, and, realizing his mistake, turned
the conversation in another direction.
"And how about those rough fellows around the wharves--those who
don't know you--are they never coarse and brutal to you?"
"Not when I look 'em in the face," she answered slowly and
deliberately. "No man ever opens his head, nor dar'sn't. When
they see me a-comin' they stops talkin', if it's what they
wouldn't want their daughters to hear; an' there ain't no dirty
back talk, neither. An' I make me own men civil, too, with a
dacint tongue in their heads. I had a young strip of a lad once
who would be a-swearin' round the stables. I told him to mend his
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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 Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner: men, she seemed to me much too good to be among them; I would have given
all their compliments if she would once have smiled at me as she smiled at
them, with all her face breaking into radiance, with her dimples and
flashing teeth. But I knew it never could be; I felt sure she hated me;
that she wished I was dead; that she wished I had never come to the
village. She did not know, when we went out riding, and a man who had
always ridden beside her came to ride beside me, that I sent him away; that
once when a man thought to win my favour by ridiculing her slow drawl
before me I turned on him so fiercely that he never dared come before me
again. I knew she knew that at the hotel men had made a bet as to which
was the prettier, she or I, and had asked each man who came in, and that
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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 Tattine by Ruth Ogden [Mrs. Charles W. Ide]: all about it as they sat together in the porch that morning after breakfast.
She even laughed her cap way over on one side, so that Tattine had to take out
the gold pins and put them in again to straighten it.
"But Grandma," said Tattine, when they had sobered down, "those puppies,
cunning as they are now, will just be cruel setters when they grow up, killing
everything they come across, birds and rabbits and chipmunks."
"Tattine," said Grandma Luty, with her dear, kindly smile "your Mother has
told me how disappointed you have been this summer in Betsy and Doctor and
little Black-and-white, and that now Barney has fallen into disgrace, since he
kept you so long in the ford the other day, but I want to tell you something.
You must not stop loving them at all because they do what you call cruel
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