Today's Stichomancy for Steve Martin

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Dream Life and Real Life by Olive Schreiner:

with the navvy's long knife, and covered up the blood with sand, and buried the entrails and skin. Then they talked, and quarrelled a little; and then they talked quietly again.

The Hottentot man put a leg of the kid under his coat and left the rest of the meat for the two in the sluit, and walked away.

When little Jannita awoke it was almost sunset. She sat up very frightened, but her goats were all about her. She began to drive them home. "I do not think there are any lost," she said.

Dirk, the Hottentot, had brought his flock home already, and stood at the kraal door with his ragged yellow trousers. The fat old Boer put his stick across the door, and let Jannita's goats jump over, one by one. He counted

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Bucolics by Virgil:

No more shall mariner sail, nor pine-tree bark Ply traffic on the sea, but every land Shall all things bear alike: the glebe no more Shall feel the harrow's grip, nor vine the hook; The sturdy ploughman shall loose yoke from steer, Nor wool with varying colours learn to lie; But in the meadows shall the ram himself, Now with soft flush of purple, now with tint Of yellow saffron, teach his fleece to shine. While clothed in natural scarlet graze the lambs. "Such still, such ages weave ye, as ye run,"

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare:

Here the anthem doth commence: Love and constancy is dead; Phoenix and the turtle fled In a mutual flame from hence.

So they lov'd, as love in twain Had the essence but in one; Two distincts, division none: Number there in love was slain.

Hearts remote, yet not asunder; Distance, and no space was seen 'Twixt the turtle and his queen;

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 Little Rivers by Henry van Dyke:

gentle sport which is said to have the merit of growing better as the weather grows worse.

I laid this fact before the landlord of the hotel of the Erzherzog Johann, as poetically as I could, but he assured me that it was of no consequence without an invitation from the gentleman to whom the streams belonged; and he had gone away for a week. The landlord was such a good-natured person, and such an excellent sleeper, that it was impossible to believe that he could have even the smallest inaccuracy upon his conscience. So I bade him farewell, and took my way, four miles through the woods, to the lake from which one of the streams flowed.