"I cannot say at what age I made my first kites; but I remember how my comrades used to tease me at our game of 'Pigeon flies'! All the children gather round a table, and the leader calls out: 'Pigeon flies! Hen flies! Crow flies! Bee flies!' and so on; and at each call we were supposed to raise our fingers. Sometimes, however, he would call out: 'Dog flies! Fox flies!' or some other like impossibility, to catch us. If any one should raise a finger, he was made to pay a forfeit. Now my playmates never failed to wink and smile mockingly at me when one of them called 'Man flies!' For at the word I would always lift my finger very high, as a sign of absolute conviction; and I refused with energy to pay the forfeit. The more they laughed at me, the happier I was." Of course he read Jules Verne's stories and was carried away in imagination in that author's wonderful balloons and flying machines. He also devoured the history of aërial navigation which he found in the works of Camille Flammarion and Wilfrid de Fonvielle. He says, further: "At an early age I was taught the principles of mechanics by my father, an engineer of the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures of Paris. From childhood I had a passion for making calculations and inventing; and from my tenth year I was accustomed to handle the powerful and heavy machines of our factories, and drive the compound locomotives on our plantation railroads. I was constantly taken up with the desire to lighten their parts; and I dreamed of air-ships and flying machines. The fact that up to the end of the nineteenth century those who occupied themselves with aërial navigation passed for crazy, rather pleased than offended me. It is incredible and yet true that in the kingdom of the wise, to which all of us flatter ourselves we belong, it is always the fools who finish by being in the right. I had read that Montgolfière was thought a fool until the day when he stopped his insulters' mouths by launching the first spherical balloon into the heavens." [Illustration: The Trial of Count Zeppelin's Air-Ship, July 2, 1900.] Upon going to Paris Santos-Dumont at once took up the work of making himself familiar with ballooning in all of its practical aspects. He saw that if he were ever to build an air-ship he must first know all there was to know about balloon-making, methods of filling with gas, lifting capacities, the action of balloons in the air, and all the thousand and one things connected with ordinary ballooning. And Paris has always been the centre of this information. He regards this preliminary knowledge as indispensable to every air-ship builder. He says: