March 3:—Mist and darkness of soul are clearing away. And I am welcomed in my real and permanent aspect in the streets of the New Springfield, by many fellow citizens that it appears I have known for long. I am to them also the yokel Avanel thinks me to be, and I meet with many covert smiles. It seems I have returned after years of art study in New York, and it is the first time many of them have seen me for quite awhile. I am welcomed back to town a slightly boresome but harmless cousin. But everyone calls his worst enemy cousin, as in a Kentucky village. Young Jim Kopensky asks in a cousinly manner why I start art classes here, if I had any kind of prospects in New York, rather implying that I am here because I have nowhere else to go. He takes up a strain remarkably like that of Avanel, and insists that I failed with the great metropolitan oracles of art because of uncreased trousers, and merely stares with incredulity when I insist that their trousers are often uncreased, and some of them dress like rag bags. Despite many similar greetings, I inwardly vow to start my art classes anyhow, and I spend a morning having a most fraternal chat with Sparrow Short. He is retouching a portrait of Mara of Singapore, painted several years ago when she was a young girl, and the political issue between Singapore and America was not so keen. Short is determined to exhibit it at the August opening of The World’s Fair of the University of Springfield. In this picture I behold her in her glory, a premature creature of thirteen, a Singaporian Juliet, Short says “more hectic in her aspect than she is now. At the present she is an exceedingly cool panther.” The days Short painted this portrait, she was deeply reading the most inflaming Singaporian romance, and in the portrait it flashes recklessly from her, and her eyes and mouth are round with the thought of the loves of the lost gods, who flourished before the prophet of the Cocaine Buddha of Singapore killed them all in the jungle. She is dressed in green silk and in her hands is a great green feather fan. Short is painting out certain vague white blossoms on a bush in the background and turning them to green buds, for Mara has imperiously demanded it. I am living near the studio of Sparrow Short, in one of the old houses of Springfield on South Fourth Street which existed in my previous life, and where once lived a dear friend of mine. Everything in the old house is disposed and ordered as formerly, and it is only when I step out on the front lawn and pass under a certain mulberry tree that I seem to be in the New Springfield. I pass under this tree. I walk a little way to the house of Avanel, and we saunter abroad. And the fogs are blowing away and she is in a most amiable mood, and I am able to note that our city is indeed a flying, fluttering place.