Today's Stichomancy for Rachel Weisz

The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from On Revenues by Xenophon:

martial spirit and readiness for war. I anticipate that those who are under orders to go through gymnastic training will devote themselves with a new zeal to the details of the training school, now that they will receive a larger maintenance whilst[64] under the orders of the trainer in the torch race. So again those on garrison duty in the various fortresses, those enrolled as peltasts, or again as frontier police to protect the rural districts, one and all will carry out their respective duties more ardently when the maintenance[64] appropriate to these several functions is duly forthcoming.

[64] I follow Zurborg in omitting {e}. If {e} is to stand, transl. "than they get whilst supplied by the gymnasiarch in the torch

The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Puck of Pook's Hill by Rudyard Kipling:

"'Serve Robert or the King - England or Normandy," said De Aquila. "I care not which it is, but make thy choice here and now."

"'The King, then," said Fulke, "for I see he is better served than Robert. Shall I swear it?"

"'No need," said De Aquila, and he laid his hand on the parchments which Gilbert had written. "It shall be some part of my Gilbert's penance to copy out the savoury tale of thy life, till we have made ten, twenty, an hundred, maybe, copies. How many cattle, think you, would the Bishop of Tours give for that tale? Or thy

The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from The Monster Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs:

thing for whom he had once intended her.

Like a tigress the girl turned upon the two white men.

"You are murderers," she cried. "Cowardly murderers. Weak and exhausted by fever he could not combat you, and so you have robbed the world of one of the noblest men that God ever created."

"Hush!" cried Professor Maxon. "Hush, child, you do not know what you say. The thing was a monster-- a soulless monster."

At the words the girl looked up quickly at her father, a faint realization of his meaning striking her like a

The Monster Men

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 Malbone: An Oldport Romance by Thomas Wentworth Higginson:

single fragment of ship-timber, black with time and weeds, and crusty with barnacles, heaved to and fro in the edge of the surf, and two fishermen's children, a boy and girl, tilted upon it as it moved, clung with the semblance of terror to each other, and played at shipwreck.

The rocks were dark with moisture, steaming in the sun. Great sheets of ice, white masks of departing winter, clung to every projecting cliff, or slid with crash and shiver into the surge. Icicles dropped their slow and reverberating tears upon the rock where Emilia once lay breathless; and it seemed as if their cold, chaste drops were sent to cleanse from her memory