| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Tour Through Eastern Counties of England by Daniel Defoe: carabine shot; and after a very gallant resistance, the horse on
the right being also overpowered, the word was given to retreat,
which, however, was done in such good order, the regiments of
reserve standing drawn up at the end of the street, ready to
receive the enemy's horse upon the points of their pikes, that the
royal troops came on in the openings between the regiments, and
entered the town with very little loss, and in very good order.
By this, however, those regiments of reserve were brought at last
to sustain the efforts of the enemy's whole army, till being
overpowered by numbers they were put into disorder, and forced to
get into the town in the best manner they could; by which means
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Man in Lower Ten by Mary Roberts Rinehart: The trip west was without incident. I played bridge with a
furniture dealer from Grand Rapids, a sales agent for a Pittsburg
iron firm and a young professor from an eastern college. I won
three rubbers out of four, finished what cigarettes McKnight had
left me, and went to bed at one o'clock. It was growing cooler,
and the rain had ceased. Once, toward morning, I wakened with a
start, for no apparent reason, and sat bolt upright. I had an
uneasy feeling that some one had been looking at me, the same
sensation I had experienced earlier in the evening at the window.
But I could feel the bag with the notes, between me and the
window, and with my arm thrown over it for security, I lapsed
The Man in Lower Ten |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Juana by Honore de Balzac: much money, and continued playing. Little by little, he returned to
the dissipated life he had formerly lived. Soon he ceased even to dine
in his own home.
Some months went by in the enjoyment of this new independence; he was
determined to preserve it, and in order to do so he separated himself
from his wife, giving her the large apartments and lodging himself in
the entresol. By the end of the year Diard and Juana only saw each
other in the morning at breakfast.
Like all gamblers, he had his alternations of loss and gain. Not
wishing to cut into the capital of his fortune, he felt the necessity
of withdrawing from his wife the management of their income; and the
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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 Night and Day by Virginia Woolf: replied at random. Mr. Fortescue had been observing her for a moment
or two, as novelists are inclined to observe, and at this remark he
smiled, and made it the text for a little further speculation.
"In spite of a slight tendency to exaggeration, Katharine decidedly
hits the mark," he said, and lying back in his chair, with his opaque
contemplative eyes fixed on the ceiling, and the tips of his fingers
pressed together, he depicted, first the horrors of the streets of
Manchester, and then the bare, immense moors on the outskirts of the
town, and then the scrubby little house in which the girl would live,
and then the professors and the miserable young students devoted to
the more strenuous works of our younger dramatists, who would visit
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