And when the days passed, white shrouded, and we discussed the theories we had made and demolished, I found to my astonishment that my friends had taken up a remote position on the subject. They were extremely doubtful about my story of the auto. Most likely, said they, it was a late Store delivery van. I had imagined so much. They paid detestable tribute to my imaginative powers. Married people are like this. With disconcerting abruptness, they wheel round together and go off at some incalculable tangent, serenely unconscious of any need for explanation. They made matters worse by harping on my imagination. And they capped all by declaring that I was a bad man and hoped I would keep my evil thoughts to myself at the Festive Season. It is here that Miss Fraenkel interposed, all unconsciously, and became the cause of our presence at a most singular catastrophe, the collapse of the aeroplane in the snow. For had we not gone out that night to visit Miss Fraenkel and with her see the New Year safely born, we should have had no vivid memory of that terrible descent, nor understood how Fate had woven our neighbours' destinies, and how inexplicably she can drive to ruin at the moment of victory. My friends had been to New York during the day, I remember, visiting friends in Lexington Avenue, and they mentioned at dinner a report in the paper that Mr. Francis Lord was to fly from the Gottschalk grounds, on the banks of Lake Champlain, to New York and give a demonstration of the aeroplane over the city. New machines had come from England, hope sprang eternal in the reporting breast, and events of staggering scientific import were foreshadowed. Other experts were pessimistic. They claimed their own apparatus was better than D'Aubigne's and so got a little advertisement for themselves. Other experts again blamed the administration in a vague way. An eminent actress was interviewed and spoke of her new telephone play without adding much to the national stock of wisdom. A famous evangelist of the rough-house type proposed to use the new apparatus for reaching distant settlements.