| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo: let us view its flagrant offences, show me the woman and the child.
It is by the amount of protection with which these two feeble creatures
are surrounded that the degree of civilization is to be measured.
Is prostitution less heartrending in Naples than in Paris?
What is the amount of truth that springs from your laws, and what
amount of justice springs from your tribunals? Do you chance to be
so fortunate as to be ignorant of the meaning of those gloomy words:
public prosecution, legal infamy, prison, the scaffold, the executioner,
the death penalty? Italians, with you as with us, Beccaria is dead
and Farinace is alive. And then, let us scrutinize your state reasons.
Have you a government which comprehends the identity of morality
Les Miserables |
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Whirligigs by O. Henry: staff around a cablegram as thick as flies around a Park
Row lemonade stand. If he could only get that message
past the censor -- the new censor who had arrived and
taken his post that day!
Calloway did the obviously proper thing. He lit his pipe
and sat down on a gun carriage to think it over. And
there we must leave him; for the rest of the story belongs
to Vesey, a sixteen-dollar-a-week reporter on the Enterprise.
Calloway's cablegram was handed to the managing editor
at four o'clock in the afternoon. He read it three times; and
then drew a pocket mirror from a pigeon-hole in his desk,
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