“‘The Aviator,’ she says, ‘is our delegate to the congress of planets.’ Yet if we agree with every song of Portia, there is even more to be said for looking out upon the fields from no higher point of vantage than the footpath, if we be taking such a pilgrimage as that of St. Scribe of the Shrines, beginning with the first shrine, the Tomb of Lincoln, and praying the prayers St. Scribe has written down for us, as we go around the world to the one hundred shrines of the one hundred religions. We may take part of that journey by steamship and airship but it is when we are afoot we gain wisdom.” And so St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, continues upon his favorite theme of “The Pilgrimage” and urges upon us that life is a glorious adventure and was never meant to be a matter of merely mechanical achievement or cold calculation for physical power. And Avanel’s heightened color continues. But what is the real Avanel? As we leave church, we look up and she shrieks with delight. Every known variety of machine is in long line, is in cavalry formations in which she delights, some of which she uses with her own Amazons, and she shouts the orders and claps her hands and tries to anticipate each new maneuver with her orders, like chanticleer crowing, and ordering the sun to rise. She stands amid the purple cottages like a fairy in a bed of violets and it is as though all the butterflies of the Sangamon Valley land had become gorgeous giants for us and were flying for our delight. For overhead friend and foe are celebrating truce, if not peace, and the whole remaining populace is in the street to behold it. May 25:—I am reading in the Truth Tower, in the newspaper lookout room, last evening’s _Boone Ax_ with Avanel and talking it over with her. It seems that the inside political whispers convey to the intelligent the fact that Mayo Sims has sent out his dragnet:—his jesters, his druggists, his coffee house wits, to talk among the older people and get their youngsters in hand. And he has been strongly abetted by the arrogant Rock family. The arrogant Rock family have other, if limited, claims to consideration. They have rightly prided themselves on being experts on the coal question. Some of the most offensive of them are indeed learned in this matter. It remains a family talent and accomplishment, when nothing else can be said for these people. For many a day, and indeed for two generations, on behalf of the city and state, they have been flying from mine to mine in their working hours, giving expert advice or exercising stern authority, according to their specific offices. The Rock family began as the Michaelites began. For a long time it was a tradition that every boy of the Rock clan must dig coal with the pick for a certain number of years, and belong to the Miner’s Union. But these people gradually rose from labor-union officers, who dug, in a nominal way, to able but unwholesome fops who would rather be hanged than dirty their own hands in coal.