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.
St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, is indeed an old man, a little lame, leaning on a cane. He is much over six feet tall, when straightened, and with a smooth shaven countenance, but looking as Abraham Lincoln might have done, had he lived into another century and grown grayer with no other sign of the passing of the years. St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, receives Avanel as a favorite daughter and convert and indeed I feel in the air the justification for my estimate of this girl. In his presence she puts aside all vestige of nonsense. It is Church to her to be with him.
St. Friend disgraces himself by taking the oldest kind of a corncob pipe from a shelf inside the fireplace and smoking like a chimney. He asks Avanel if she cares and she says, “No, certainly not.”
We get to the matter of the flags quite late in the evening.
St. Friend tells how in his youth when Apple-Amaranth blossoms had as now a touch of red in the hearts, those hearts began to be called, “The Blood of Hunter Kelly,” and St. Friend suggests that the saying be restored to its former place on the tongues of Springfield, especially since the red and white star in the municipal flag is copied from this flower.
Then much of what he and Avanel have to say to each other about the flag he declares he will put into his next sermon. It is plain to me that this gray mind leans for vitality upon the mind of the proud young child. She knows it not but only thinks herself a kind of playmate in a solemn way.
On the way home Avanel is much ashamed of herself for staying so long and says that I am an awkward lummox, and I can walk home my own way.
Therefore I make my speech, as I take her sternly to her door. She holds herself straight as a ramrod, with lips stubbornly pursed together, as I say: