| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from The Commission in Lunacy by Honore de Balzac: necessarily bifrons; he could guess the virtues of a pauper--good
feelings nipped, fine actions in embryo, unrecognized self-sacrifice,
just as he could read at the bottom of a man's conscience the faintest
outlines of a crime, the slenderest threads of wrongdoing, and infer
all the rest.
Popinot's inherited fortune was a thousand crowns a year. His wife,
sister to M. Bianchon SENIOR, a doctor at Sancerre, had brought him
about twice as much. She, dying five years since, had left her fortune
to her husband. As the salary of a supernumerary judge is not large,
and Popinot had been a fully salaried judge only for four years, we
may guess his reasons for parsimony in all that concerned his person
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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 Boys' Life of Abraham Lincoln by Helen Nicolay: to the Southern leaders in this movement the forts, navy-yards,
arsenals, mints, ships, and other government property under their
charge. President Buchanan, in whose hands alone rested the power
to punish these traitors and avenge their insults to the
government he had sworn to protect and defend, showed no
disposition to do so; and Lincoln, looking on with a heavy heart,
was unable to interfere in any way. No matter how anxiously he
might watch the developments at Washington or in the Cotton
States, no matter what appeals might be made to him, no action of
any kind was possible on his part.
The only bit of cheer that came to him and other Union men during
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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 Damaged Goods by Upton Sinclair: debauchery like the rest. And what did they know about these
dreadful diseases? They had the most horrible superstitions--
ideas of cures so loathsome that they could not be set down in
print; ideas as ignorant and destructive as those of savages in
the heart of Africa. And you might hear them laughing and
jesting about one another's condition. They might be afflicted
with diseases which would have the most terrible after-effects
upon their whole lives and upon their families--diseases which
cause tens of thousands of surgical operations upon women, and a
large percentage of blindness and idiocy in children--and you
might hear them confidently express the opinion that these
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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 When a Man Marries by Mary Roberts Rinehart: that any of us might take sick and die, shut in that contaminated
atmosphere, and that if he did he wanted it all settled. And
whether I took him or not he wanted me to remember him kindly if
anything happened. I really hated to refuse him--he was in such
deadly earnest. But it was quite unnecessary for him to have
blamed his refusal, as he did, on Mr. Harbison. I am sure I had
refused him plenty of times before I had ever heard of the man.
Yes, it was just after he proposed to me that Flannigan came to
the door and called Mr. Harbison out into the hall.
Flannigan--like most of the people in the house--always went to
Mr. Harbison when there was anything to be done. He openly adored
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