He carefully turns the machine till it is facing the wind, takes his hand off the wheel to test the stability, alters direction slightly, and feeling satisfied pulls back the throttle. The noise of the engines dies away as the machine begins to glide downward. He stands up on the rudder and I crawl in behind him and sit on his seat. He moves his body to the left so that I can grasp the wheel, and as soon as he takes his feet from the rudder I place mine firmly on the foot-rests of ribbed rubber. With my hands and feet on the controls, I sit in the huge machine as we glide downwards singing. The speed indicator creeps back to thirty-eight miles an hour. "Shove her nose down--keep it at fifty, you fool!" the pilot yells. Forward goes the wheel, and the fingers of the height indicator creep up to fifty-five. I find I can easily steer the machine, and it is no more difficult than the little Curtiss's of old days at Luxeuil. "Shove on the engines now,--slowly!" orders the pilot. I catch hold of the aluminium throttle and push it slowly forward. The engine wakes to energetic life. I am conscious of the new forward impulse given to the machine, and the rudder begins to vibrate frantically beneath my feet. The country in front of my eyes begins to sway to the right. I am slipping. I try to remember which to turn to the right in order to convert it--the wheel or the rudder. I move the wrong one, and the country sways to the right still more and more. I get excited and push the nose down and turn the wheel over, and at last, amidst the curses of the pilot, regain a more or less even balance. I then try to make a turn. I push the rudder to the right, and it goes hard over. As a result the machine slips violently, and the little bubble in the "slip tube" rushes from the centre and tries to creep out of one end. I fling over the wheel to reduce the slip, and the machine banks terrifically, but a little more accurately, for the reluctant bubble returns towards the middle of the tube. The pilot curses more and more luridly, but I have learnt the lesson that the rudder has to be allowed to go over a little way, instead of being pushed over, as it has a natural tendency to go hard forward on one side or the other. For a while I fly the machine fairly decently, to my great joy, and then I change places with the pilot, who, to instruct me, does some steep banks, but so accurately that not only does the bubble remain motionless in the middle of its tube, but a little wooden rabbit-mascot, which I stand on a shelf inside the machine, does not fall over, though we are at an angle of some sixty-five or seventy degrees to the ground. We glide gloriously down through the sunlight and land on the aerodrome, avoiding carefully the three deep craters.