Mr. Bell’s plan of living was modeled to suit himself. Often he slept through the day when interruptions naturally came and the telephone most often rang! If restless at night he played the piano. Mrs. Bell could not hear, and the rest of the family, being young and devoted, were never disturbed. He was up and began his day around four to six. Often there were guests for dinner, for everybody of note the world over who came to Washington wanted to meet him. On Wednesdays after dinner there usually gathered a group of scientists and public men to talk things over. Mr. Bell was something to see at these dinners and gatherings, the finest social impresario I ever saw in action, so welcoming, appreciative, eager, receptive. I thought then I had never seen anybody so generous about what others were doing. He loved to draw out great stories of adventure and discovery and would silence all talkers when once such narrating was started. Partly this was because of Mrs. Bell, his intense desire that she enjoy everything that was going on; and she did, thanks to the intelligent devotion of her daughters, Elsie and Marian, the first now the wife of Gilbert Grosvenor, one of the founders and the present editor of the _National Geographic Magazine_, the second the wife of David Fairchild, botanist and explorer, the organizer in the Agriculture Department of the work now known as the Division of Foreign Plant Exploration and Introduction—two men to whom the public owes big debts for services. The most distinguished member of this Washington group of scientists after Mr. Bell was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution, at that time agonizing over the problem of flying. When I first met Dr. Langley in 1894 he was working on his air runner or aerodrome, a machine which, as I gathered from the talk I heard and did not too well understand, was to run on the air as an engine does on rails. He finally came out with a machine weighing about twenty-five pounds made up of a pair of rigid wings, twelve to fifteen feet across, and an engine which weighed not over seven pounds. It had cost him four years’ work to develop the engine to that lightness. But would it fly? Could it be launched? Attempts were made from a houseboat down the river. These experiments were carried on with the utmost secrecy, for Dr. Langley was a taciturn man, proud, dignified, always awesome to me. He knew that there was a public that thought him a little touched in the head and wondered that the Government kept, as director of a great national institution, a man who held the crazy notion that one day people would fly, and who was willing to give his days and nights to proving it.