May 5:—I have seen in waking dreams, as I walk on the edge of New Springfield, at the prairie end of a shadowed deserted street, a great open door into the deep of eternity and, hovering above the great deep, Springfield, when it becomes the perfect and transcendent city. I look down upon towers so packed together in a sheaf and the flags so mighty, it seems but a fantasy of celestial flagstaffs and pinnacles. There are many flags of the International Government and many flashes of the Star Spangled Banner. But one flag stirs me the most. It is the one embroidered with the very silk and with the very same stitches I have seen Avanel put in with much silly chat so lately. It is the flag nearest. It is on a tower rising from the deep, a neighbor, it seems, I can almost touch. But as I look there are thousands of flags like it suddenly unfurled on a myriad pinnacles of the city below. May 6:—All the city is mourning the blighting of the season’s acorns and Amaranth Apples and the buds of the Golden Rain Tree. Almost all the boughs have the little blackened tufts of buds and leaves. Avanel meets me at the door in the evening. Her father has given her a terrific scolding for what she says is “nothing much” and she is glad to walk and walk for miles and cool off in the clear starry air. I get it out of her, she has been trying to stop her father’s smoking. But she is forgetting it and taking on her sibyl mood. Later she confesses she has been trying to get her father to cut his hair and quit dyeing his left hand crimson and that he has been trying to get her to dye her hand and unbind her hair as a Boone should. So, sore of heart, she is willing that we should be true comrades in the midst of this universe. And at once we are, as it were, brothers and sisters of the stars. She goes so far as to take my arm. She agrees to my proposal that we pluck out the mystery of the souls of our city’s flags together, if two young creatures may get such wisdom. May 7:—Avanel this evening takes me to call upon St. Friend, The Giver of Bread. It is, in her eyes, quite a religious function. And we are to inquire formally about flags. St. Friend knows me not, though there is something in his voice that goes back one hundred years, and I dimly remember, in my double consciousness, visits with a friend who had much the same furniture, and some of the same turns of phrase, but he had not the face or figure of this man. We are by the open fireplace, under the old lithograph of Alexander Campbell. Flashing in the firelight, is the old bookcase to the left, containing the bound volumes of the _Millenial Harbinger_ and Richardson’s old life of Campbell and all the rest of it.