Just as he named the sword “The Avanel Sword,” knowing not of the child who was coming in one hundred years, he named these “The Avanel Gates,” for the perhaps mythical Avanel of more than one hundred years ago.
These gates are massive and towering, yet a little distance away are wonderfully trellised vines, seeming to be climbing the white wall from which the gates are swung.
In the center of each design is a Golden Rain Tree. The blossoms of the tree are most delicately wrought, and shining with gold foil against the black. These trees were, in especial, the work of the hammers of the three daughters.
But now, to the delight of the old Japanese, and the delight of us all, the magnificent cavalcade of men and women sweeps in from their city parade through these ancestral gates, to the Camp Lincoln grounds, in order, yet in riot, after the manner of a great dance of gay and inspired horses and horsemen. And they are all within the command of Avanel, standing high in her stirrups, and as much beneath her eye and as subject to her entranced fancy, as has been St. Friend, the Giver of Bread, when she uttered his sermons for him, hardly knowing how she did it, except that she spoke her mind.
The men on horseback are but the background of the girls in their Diana mood. The huntress, and yet the Pallas Athena, seems roused in all these girls in white. Most of them are in their first strength:—high school girls when they are still a bit Tom boy; that which is with every girl for a year or half a lifetime as a reminiscence of the primeval girlhood of her far grandmothers, when they rode the two-toed and three-toed horse in equestrian dance and revel.
High above all the other flags, on gigantic poles on either side of the reviewing stand, are the official flags of the field. The poles are of equal height and the flags are of identical size and importance in the eyes of the paraders, as they salute them and salute the Japanese each time round the field:—while the afterglow turns the air to crimson and orange and grey pearl.
They go by screaming and screeching with delight, and sweep and cut the air with their Avanel blades in a sunset sword-drill. When they pass Avanel, whose horse is now near us, the salute in sign of submission to her pride, is given with all a girl Amazon’s fantastic chivalry: the Boone dagger, lifted high overhead. In her person at least, the Boones of Springfield have put the Michaels of Springfield under their feet. And certainly the whitest thing in the whole whirlwind of white is the spirited head of old Joseph Bartholdi Michael, the Second. Whatever the morrow between these clans, his submission is made as she sights him, and he bows and salutes in the last afterglow, and she forces him to lead the review beside her.
The Japanese watches and wonders and says to the press gallery that of course no day can be women’s day and men’s day equally, and this is one of the days of the women.
Now all the while I have been wondering about a certain device that is the millinery and nonsense of this drill park, the globe that is the mechanical toy of these laughing girls. Now the whole company are whirling round and round that giant school-globe that looms like the dome of the Taj Mahal in the center of the field. Upon the surface of the sphere of hollow crystal, the map of the world now begins to blaze out as darkness comes on, the continents in the conventional colors of the school globes from the beginning of the log school house days. The interior of the sphere is a vapor, the color of the sea, but becoming iridescent as though the world were but a bubble blown by the fancy of one of the powers of the universe. The changes of light are painted upon the faces of the riders and the flanks of the horses.
July 17:—The Japanese is addressing the leaders of the Horseshoe Brotherhood and the Amazons. He says in conclusion:—“Hardly a man on the earth wanted the war to come that was waged against the World Government thirty years ago, if we are to believe the professions then made. So far as I can discover not one responsible statesman expected or intended it. Such dynamite may be touched off again, and this time it will be with more cause and more open anticipation. So though the responsible ones like Michael and my brother, if I may say so, are doing their best to prevent war, half the world is drilling and riding and marching, and flying about in practice war planes, and even here where the Great World’s Fair of the University of Springfield is going on, that seems in itself an assurance of international brotherhood forever, you are drilling more zealously every day.