’Most anybody can tell you how it looked, for by nine o’clock the whole village was out to it. But I’ll never be able to tell much about the feel of the minute when I see the two great silk wings and the airy wire, and knew I was coming close up to a flying-machine, setting there on the ground, like a god that had stopped on a knoll to tie his shoe. A man was down on his hands and knees, doing something to an underneath part of it, but I guess at first I hardly see him. The machine was the thing, the machine that could go up in the air, the machine that _had done it at last_! “Good morning,” says the man, all of a sudden. “Am I trespassing?” He stood there with his cap in his hand, clean-muscled, youngish, easy-acting, and as casual as if he’d just come out of a doorway instead of out of the sky. I says, “Ain’t it wonderful? Ain’t it wonderful?” Which is just exactly what I’d said about Mis’ Toplady’s crocheted bed-spread. It’s terrible to try to talk with nothing but the dictionary back of you. “Yes,” he says, “it is. Then I’m not trespassing?” “No more’n the eagles of the Lord,” I says to him. “Are you broke down?” “There’s a little something wrong with the balance,” he says. “I’m going to lie over here a day or so, providing the eagle of the Lord figure holds for the town. What place will this be?” he asks. “Friendship Village,” I says. “Friendship Village,” he says it after me, and looked off at it. And I stood for a minute looking at it, too. Beyond the trees north of the pasture it lay, with little lifts of smoke curling up from folks’s cook-stoves. There was a look to it of breakfasts a-getting and stores being opened and the day rousting up. Right while we looked, the big, bass seven o’clock whistle blew over to the round-house, and the little peepy one chimed in up at the brick-yard, and I could hear the town clock in the engine-house striking, kind of old-fashioned and sweet-toned. And all around the country lay quiet-seeming, down to the flats and out acrost the tracks and clear to the city limits that we couldn’t see, where the life of the little fields was going on. And in that nice, cozy, seven-o’clock minute I see it all as I do sometimes, almost like a person sitting there, with its face turned towards me, expectant, waiting to see what I’m going to do for it. “Jove,” says the man, “look at it! Look at it. It looks like the family sitting down to breakfast.” I glanced up at him quick. Not many sees villages that way. The most sees them like cats asleep in the sun. But I always like to think of ’em like a room--a little room in the house, full of its family, real busy getting the room-work done up in time. “From here,” I says, “it does most look like a real town.” “More folks live in the little towns of the United States than in the big cities of it,” he said, absent. “They _do_?” I says.