“Where’s Threat and ’Lish?” I says to Eppleby, that was helping keep the children in order. “Dustin’ the mayor’s office out ready, I s’pose,” he says, wrinkling his eyes at the corners. “Mebbe they’ve abducted each other,” Mis’ Toplady suggests, soothing. Mis’ Sykes looked over from filling the syrup pitchers--she’d boiled the brown sugar down for that, and it added its thick, golden smell unto the general inviting mixture. “I don’t think,” she says serious, “that you’d ought to speak disrespectful of _any_body that’s going to be your mayor. Public officials,” said she, “had ought to be paid respect to, or else the law won’t be carried out.” “Shucks,” says Mis’ Toplady, short. She’d made upwards of ninety griddle cakes by then, and she was getting kind of flustered and crispy. “Shucks?” says Mis’ Sykes, haughty and questioning, and all but in two syllables. “If that’s all the law is,” says Mis’ Toplady, beating away at her pancake batter, “give me anar-kicky, or whatever it is they call it.” Mis’ Sykes never said a word. She just went on making syrup, reproachful. Mis’ Sykes is one of them that acts like life was made up of the pattern of things, and like speaking of warf and woof wasn’t delicate. And she never so much as lets on they is such a thing as a knot. Yes, some folks is like that. But not me--not me. It was ’most half-past seven o’clock when the bird-man was ready. Like a big bug the machine looked, with spidery, bent legs and wings spread ready and no head necessary. And when he finally run it off down the square and headed towards the Pump pasture, my heart sunk some. My land, I thought, it can’t be a real true one. I guess there are them, but this right here on the market square can’t be one. Since the world begun, there ain’t a more wonderful minute for folks than the minute when they first see some kind of flying-machine leave the ground--_leave the ground_! It’s like seeing the future come true right in your face. The thing done it so gentle and so simple that you’d of thought it was invented when legs was. It lifted itself up in the air, like by its own boot-straps, and it went up and up and up, just like going up was its own alphabet. It went and it kept going, its motor buzzing and purring, softer and softer. And pretty soon the blue that it was going up to meet seemed to come down and meet it, and the two sort of joined, and the big, wide gold morning flowed all over them, and the first thing I knew the bird-man’s machine and him in it looked like just what I had said: an eagle of the Lord, soaring to meet the sun like a friend of its.