Much though my weight was reduced, and ardent though I was in my attempts to come up with their mastery over the air, I was seldom able to do more than quicken my pace in running and rise in short, clumsy, laboured flights on their wings like a callow nestling fallen from its nest. I was soon exhausted by my efforts, even when aided by my ultimately deft management of the breast-engine and the shoulder-engines; for my lungs were short of compass, my heart soon beat too rapidly for the strength of its tissue, and my arms and fingers and great toe soon grew weary of the work they had to do. Nothing but the selection and adaptation of my ancestry could have made me capable of progressing physically to their level. Their past had been a rapid and deliberate process of adjustment to new and higher ideas of life, one of the main aims being this new mode of locomotion in order to give them command of a sphere that other men had abandoned to the birds and insects; for it was but one of the corollaries of the great purpose of their existence, which was to master or eject the grosser elements of their system, that they might rise into a more ethereal or spiritual life. By the power of flight they seemed to gain independence of the earth, greater freedom of movement, and an approach to that frictionless, untrammelled motion through limitless space which thought gives a foretaste of. CHAPTER IV HERMITRY FLIGHT was one of their best methods too of achieving complete solitude. One of the early discoveries of this people in the art of progress was that, where men are too much or too long together, they confirm each other’s faults and clog advance; the weaker and more superficial ambitions get the mastery and force energy into mistaken directions. The risk of this grew less as the individual grew older; for he receded farther and farther from the ancestral stages of life through which he must pass in youth and early manhood; and he came to have less desire and less need for intercourse with his fellows. Complete love of solitude and capacity for solitude were two of the signs of the perfecting of the individual life; thereafter death, the rending of the veil that divides the seen from the unseen, was the most natural step in development, and scarcely needed effort. They held solitude as much one of the essentials of noble life as society; and the latter needed no stimulus; by nature and beginnings man was a social animal, but only some strong impulse would make him seek the companionship of his own thoughts. The final triumph of life was to be able to be confidently alone, to stand with the highest man can think and feel against the herded universe. Under the stimulus of the more physical and primary passions it is the universal instinct to flock together. The baser, the more destructive feelings are gregarious.