Springfield (Ill.) -- Fiction; Springfield (Ill.) -- In literature; Utopias in literature
But now, to the delight of the old Japanese, and the delight of us all,
the magnificent cavalcade of men and women sweeps in from their city
parade through these ancestral gates, to the Camp Lincoln grounds, in
order, yet in riot, after the manner of a great dance of gay and
inspired horses and horsemen. And they are all within the command of
Avanel, standing high in her stirrups, and as much beneath her eye and
as subject to her entranced fancy, as has been St. Friend, the Giver of
Bread, when she uttered his sermons for him, hardly knowing how she did
it, except that she spoke her mind.
The men on horseback are but the background of the girls in their Diana
mood. The huntress, and yet the Pallas Athena, seems roused in all these
girls in white. Most of them are in their first strength:—high school
girls when they are still a bit Tom boy; that which is with every girl
for a year or half a lifetime as a reminiscence of the primeval girlhood
of her far grandmothers, when they rode the two-toed and three-toed
horse in equestrian dance and revel.
High above all the other flags, on gigantic poles on either side of the
reviewing stand, are the official flags of the field. The poles are of
equal height and the flags are of identical size and importance in the
eyes of the paraders, as they salute them and salute the Japanese each
time round the field:—while the afterglow turns the air to crimson and
orange and grey pearl.
They go by screaming and screeching with delight, and sweep and cut the
air with their Avanel blades in a sunset sword-drill. When they pass
Avanel, whose horse is now near us, the salute in sign of submission to
her pride, is given with all a girl Amazon’s fantastic chivalry: the
Boone dagger, lifted high overhead. In her person at least, the Boones
of Springfield have put the Michaels of Springfield under their feet.
And certainly the whitest thing in the whole whirlwind of white is the
spirited head of old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second. Whatever the
morrow between these clans, his submission is made as she sights him,
and he bows and salutes in the last afterglow, and she forces him to
lead the review beside her.
The Japanese watches and wonders and says to the press gallery that of
course no day can be women’s day and men’s day equally, and this is one
of the days of the women.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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