April 3, 2018:—It is a sunny April morning. I note some tiny spring beauties in the patches of snow. Every cloud threatens, but every cloud rolls by. I begin to apprehend April’s pretty promise of final deliverance from frost and snow. I am loafing around the coffee houses, listening to the talk, and being received as one of the more obscure inhabitants. Occasionally some one asks, with an effort at interest, if I am starting my art classes soon. But the most lofty and the most humble call me “cousin,” as they do one another. I am sounded a bit as to whether I share the political opinions of Sparrow Short, and incidentally if we belong to the same school of art teaching, and if he will give my classes a criticism from time to time. I write down the name of the youth who seeks me out desiring to enroll and am for the first time flattered. By putting fugitive bits of loud talk with observations of the last few mornings, I begin to get the social fabric, and take a lesson in New Springfield’s politics. More women vote than men. Woman is the housekeeper and municipal politics is a kind of nest building and a house keeping of a sort. The women follow their old occupations. And they have many new ones. They are locksmiths, safe experts, confectioners, cigar factory workers and owners, makers of advertising novelties for the whole world, eye, ear, nose and throat physicians, bill posters, wallpaper cleaners, opticians, dog, cat, and bird doctors, barbers, undertakers, auctioneers, dentists, and a thousand other things. But this does not mean that women monopolize such occupations. It is only a minority that leaves the home. But it is a majority that floods the elections. They are about equally divided between the established factions among the men and perhaps getting the mass of their opinions from the men but certainly furnishing their own steam. I note many curious phases of caste, if there may be said to be such in a fluent community where everyone may change his status before nightfall by doughty deed or awful failure. There is an exalted status to occupations that were once deemed commonplace. There is yet the same distinction that used to go to lawyer or doctor or head of a university department, but it is extended to such seemingly miscellaneous occupations as conductors of Turkish baths, special gymnasiums and mud baths, billiard halls, bowling alleys. Stores for sporting and athletic goods convey great distinction. And the demi-god of these, Cave Man Thomas, is indeed held in high regard and his minions have almost the same lustre, and so he is one of the eleven city commissioners. But the end of these surprises is not complete. There is a particular dignity given to junk dealers, cobblers, garbage handlers, and manufacturers, and devisers of patent medicines. They stand as did the lords, dukes, knights, and bishops of old, if there is a charm to their private characters equal to that of their public service.