New Old Salem a mile away. New
Old Salem is a prophet's hill, on the edge of the Sangamon, with lovely
woods all around. Here a brooding soul could be born, and here the
dreamer Abraham Lincoln spent his real youth. I do not call him a dreamer
in a cheap and sentimental effort to describe a man of aspiration.
Lincoln told and interpreted his visions like Joseph and Daniel in the
Old Testament, revealing them to the members of his cabinet, in great
trials of the Civil War. People who do not see visions and dream dreams
in the good Old Testament sense have no right to leadership in America. I
would prefer photoplays filled with such visions and oracles to the state
papers written by "practical men." As it is, we are ruled indirectly by
photoplays owned and controlled by men who should be in the shoe-string
and hook-and-eye trade. Apparently their digestions are good, they are in
excellent health, and they keep out of jail.

Chapter XXI--The Acceptable Year of the Lord. If I may be pardoned for
referring again to the same book, I assumed, in The Golden Book of
Springfield, Illinois, that the Acceptable Year of the Lord would come
for my city beginning November 1, 2018, and that up to that time, amid
much of joy, there would also be much of thwarting and tribulation. But
in the beginning of that mystic November, the Soul of My City, named
Avanel, would become as much a part of the city as Pallas Athena was
Athens, and indeed I wrote into the book much of the spirit of the
photoplay outlined, pages 147 through 150. But in The Golden Book I
changed the lady the city worshipped from a golden image into a living,
breathing young girl, descendant of that great American, Daniel Boone,
and her name, obviously, Avanel Boone. With her tribe she incarnates all
the mystic ideals of the Boones of Kentucky.

All this but a prelude to saying that I have just passed through the city
of Santa Fe, New Mexico. It is a Santa Fe full of the glory of the New
Architecture of which I have spoken, and the issuing of a book of cowboy
songs collected, and many of them written, by N. Howard Thorp, a citizen
of Santa Fe, and thrilling with the issuing of a book of poems about the
Glory of New Mexico. This book is called Red Earth. It is by Alice Corbin
Henderson. And Santa Fe is full of the glory of a magnificent State
Capitol that is an art gallery of the whole southwest, and the glories of
the studio of William Penhallow Henderson, who has painted