For the present, most of these visionaries are occupied with electricity. They intend to make the lightning a domestic slave in every house, and to turn Ariel into a common carrier. But, from the aspect of Winter’s den in Paterson’s Rents, it was easy to read that his heart was set on a more ancient foible. The white deal book-shelves, home-made, which lined every wall, were packed with tattered books on mechanics, and especially on the art of flying. Here you saw the spoils of the fourpenny box of cheap bookvendors mixed with volumes in better condition, purchased at a larger cost. Here--among the litter of tattered pamphlets and well-thumbed “Proceedings” of the Linnean and the Aeronautic Society of Great Britain--here were Fredericus Hermannus’ “De Arte Volandi,” and Cayley’s works, and Hatton Turner’s “Astra Castra,” and the “Voyage to the Moon” of Cyrano de Bergerac, and Bishop Wilkins’s “Dædalus,” and the same sanguine prelate’s “Mercury, The Secret Messenger.” Here were Cardan and Raymond Lully, and a shabby set of the classics, mostly in French translations, and a score of lucubrations by French and other inventors--Ponton d’Amocourt, Borelli, Chabrier, Girard, and Marey. Even if his books had not shown the direction of the new patient’s mind--(a man is known by his books at least as much as by his companions, and companions Winter had none)--even if the shelves had not spoken clearly, the models and odds-and-ends in the room would have proclaimed him an inventor. As the walls were hidden by his library, and as the floor, also, was littered with tomes and pamphlets and periodicals, a quantity of miscellaneous gear was hung by hooks from the ceiling. Barton, who was more than commonly tall, found his head being buffeted by big preserved wings of birds and other flying things--from the sweeping pinions of the albatross to the leathery covering of the bat. From the ceiling, too, hung models, cleverly constructed in various materials; and here--a cork with quills stuck into it, and with a kind of drill-bow--was the little flying model of Sir George Cayley. The whole place, dusty and musty, with a faded smell of the oil in birds’ feathers, was almost more noisome than curious. When Barton left it, his mind was made up as to the nature of Winter’s secret, or delusion; and when he visited that queer patient in hospital, he was not surprised either by his smattered learning or by his golden dreams. “Yes, sir; Eusebius is against me, no doubt,” Winter went on with his eager talk. “An acute man--rather _too_ acute, don’t you think, for a Father of the Church? That habit he got into of smashing the arguments of the heathen, gave him a kind of flippancy in talking of high matters.” “Such as flying?” put in Barton.