Since my last to Father, I have had some very interesting times. First, I finished my _brevet_ with very little excitement, made all my voyages and only got lost a little bit once. Then I saw two machines on the ground in a field, made a rather dramatic spiral and steeply banked descent amidst a crowd of villagers and got away with it; then found that the machines belonged to two monitors who were bringing them from Paris and had effected a _panne de château_. Being asked what I was doing, I fortunately found a spark plug on the burn and got that repaired. The rest of it was very easy, a bit of flying in the rain which stings the face a bit, but is not bad otherwise. Since I have been on the Nieuport. There are three sizes of machines on which one is trained, starting with the larger double command and going to the smallest. At Pau, we get another even smaller, about as big as half-a-minute. Four times I went out without a ride--bad weather, crowded class and busted machines, the same old story. Then last night I had my first rides with a monitor who is rather oldish, crabbed and new at his job, a brand new aviator. As you know, when an airplane takes a turn, it does not remain horizontal but banks up: _comme ça_ (if you can interpret that illustration--it shows signs of remarkable imaginative power)--_alors_, one banks to take a turn and uses the rudder only a very little because the machine turns along when banked. There is a sort of falling-out feeling the first few times until one becomes a part of the machine. To get back to the story, this monitor does not like to bank his machine and sort of sidles round the corners, keeping it quite flat and almost slipping out to the outside of the turn. I have done many fool things in a machine and made many mistakes, but never have I been so scared in anything in my life as when riding with this monitor. A monitor is supposed to let the pupil drive as much as he is able, but this bird never let me make a move, and when we got through told me I was too brutal. I was never madder in my life and cursed nice American cuss words all the way home. There’s a fifteen kilo ride in a seatless tractor back to camp to improve a bad humor.