For, after these girls have gone by, she turns to the Cocaine Buddha. She bows with hands and arms outspread. Hers is a strange cry and prayer:— “Master of the World, tell me, am I more beautiful than Avanel Boone?” Which proves to me that Mara is only a girl. July 12:—I find myself in all respects an American citizen of Springfield, Illinois, today, as of old. The hours with Mara and her father are as a “tale of little meaning, though the words are strong.” As I wander through a July rain in our streets, and parks, many vague hands seem stretched from the ground, catching me by the heels. It is much later in the afternoon. The storm is gone, and I am walking with the lady Avanel, and she has looked into my eyes and given me my life again. We confess to one another that these days are certainly not the millennium, that many of them are as grotesque as the early geologic ages, that had their monster sloths and lizards big as whales, and what you will. Avanel says with her happy laughter: “Let no man declare that the end of time is soon approaching.” The lady Avanel has sometimes what might be called the mood of butterfly wings, and this afternoon, as we go further north across the fields, we are suddenly walking on a crimson cloud a little above the trees and then that cloud on its borders takes on slowly, first from the edges, the aspect of the wings of a giant butterfly whose body is at last the raft on which we stand and ride. And toward the North Star we go, and when we reach it, there sits a most grotesque and turtle-headed dwarf that Avanel calls a gnome. The North Star is really a hill of dandelions, and the dwarf is sitting at the foot of the hill. We dismount from our cloud and the dwarf goes with us down a corridor in the hill. There are on one side mirrors where details are dimmed, where only big clear outlines of a possible new Springfield are shown, and near by are shown plans for other similar villages in the world. On the other side are mirrors into which we look and see greatly magnified the raw machinery of a possible Springfield in sections that any one can understand. Then we speed along through the passageway and at last come through and see the light of the north sky on the other side of that gorgeous dandelion hill. The hill seems to be on the very edge of things, and though it has much of the aspect of that place to the east where I saw the Great Palace of Eve, once upon a time, the Dwarf calls this present cliff disrespectfully: “The Jumping-off Place.” And Avanel seems amused and exhilarated. But waves of outer darkness, into which I have looked so often, dash upon the cliff. The Dwarf says: “This particular Jumping-off Place is one of the principal suburbs of Springfield, and I have seen all kinds of Springfield people and dreams jump off here.”