June 30:—Avanel has four suitors in Springfield. I am often but a ghost in my own eyes and always but shadow to them. On the hot summer days she goes with three of them to the gigantic porcelain-lined swimming pool of Bunn Park, with two girls, a merry six. I hardly have my turn with her for several days at a time. One of her suitors is an engineer. One is a motor-truck driver. One is an aviator. I sometimes find myself the servant of all three men, but ignored as servants may be. As clouds, mists and smoke seems to choke me, through the whirlwind, I am sometimes the absurd unregarded dragon engine bearing her and the engineer to Chicago. While she laughs as his guest in the engine cab I must look down the track through the murk, and I cannot turn round and see the face of her lover, and the skies are laughing at me forever. Sometimes I am in my dream the absurd auto-truck engine, carrying her and the driver, as he delivers his last consignment of goods from the central market. Even the stones of the street laugh at me as we rattle over them. I am only a mechanical toy, and the traffic in the street, preparing for the great World’s Fair, drowns out the whispers of the young people. Sometimes I am the ridiculous flying machine in which she rides as though to mock me, with the third lover. I must soar on and carry them and they go through fearful storms and up through inconceivable blackness and I cannot see before or after. Even the sound of the rushing wind drowns out their words. And as these men dismount from their chariots, and as they are on the point of passing by me, with their lordly airs, I turn to dust. I am as dust of the road swept up by a little puff of wind. And then the witchcraft continues and I find myself a coal digger in the mine beside young Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Third, or laying brick with him somewhere, and I know that I am such stuff as dreams are made of. My fourth rival is the one I most fear. He is a twenty year old libertine, a kind of a Lord Byron. He loves her now, for a day. His name is TIME. To torture me the more and lure me on from the desire for perpetual death and to prepare me again for a more futile struggle, he gives me deep and curious days with Avanel, when we seem to be twin explorers of the Universe. And then I have big athletic days with her when I seem, not a ghost, but something as substantial as a strutting turkey gobbler.