March 2, 2018:—I am again in my New City. I begin the day by reading the Illinois State Journal of March 2; it is the same paper as of old. I note the advertisements of laundries, screen factories, cleaners and dyers, apple merchants, dealers in hats and caps, dealers in hay, grain and feed, places for the purchase of fish, game and oysters, poultry and eggs, etc. I note ladies’ furnishing establishments, retail dry goods stores, bakeries, headquarters for cash registers, meat markets, the establishments of upholsterers, places where may be found parcel delivery messengers, lists of dealers in flour and feed, various advertisements of baggage and transfer companies, dealers in wall paper, paints, oils and varnish, and everything in advertisements in the Journal to convince me that this is the same old paper, and the same old capital city. Yet I am endowed with new powers. I go about the streets as a sort of a millennial chameleon. I find myself wearing various bodies. First I am but myself, kneeling before the Image of the Virgin, in the church of St. Peter and St. Paul. In an hour I am a City Hall stenographer, in the office of the Mayor. This Mayor is referred to in the Journal as “Slick Slack Kopensky.” Later in the morning I am clerk for Justice of the Peace John Boat, whose office is right by the jail. And both the jail and the office stairs have the same old skunk smell that has distinguished jails and the stairs of justice from the beginning. Later, in the afternoon, I am an emergency messenger for the Japanese department of the World’s Fair of the University of Springfield, and am, to all appearances, a Japanese. I find myself wearing the clothes and shoes of these various supernumeraries, and in my double consciousness, knowing their affairs all through, as though I had lived in their frames twenty years. Yet no matter whose body I seem to wear or whose tongue I seem to be wagging, I step back into the same yokel when, once in the morning, and once in the afternoon, between these episodes I find myself cowering in the presence of Comrade Avanel. It is a cloudy, foggy day, and fog seems to come between us whenever I try to look at her. In the morning I win her hard consent to take yesterday’s walk again, and she promises not to scold me, only flinging out the assertion that I am a diamond in the rough and that it is her business to polish me:—a statement I seem to have heard before somewhere. In the afternoon she behaves, and the fog blows away after a while and I am able to enjoy the vision of this proud quivering young body and soul. From beneath the bantam-rooster air emerges a little glimpse of the sibyl.