“Don’t laugh at me, please sir, after you’ve been so kind. All the rest laugh at me. You can’t think what a pleasure it has been to talk to a scholar,” and there was a new flush on the poor fellow’s cheek, and something watery in his eyes. “I beg your pardon, my dear sir,” cried Barton, greatly ashamed of himself. “Pray go on. The subject is entirely new to me. I had not been aware that there were any serious modern authorities in favor of the success of this kind of experiment.” “Thank you, sir,” said Winter, much encouraged, and taking Barton’s hand in his own battered claw; “thank you. But why should we run only to modern authorities? All great inventions, all great ideas, have been present to men’s minds and hopes from the beginning of civilization. Did not Empedocles forestall Mr. Darwin, and hit out, at a stroke, the hypothesis of natural selection?” “Well, he _did_ make a shot at it,” admitted Barton, who remembered as much as that from “the old coaching days,” and college lectures at St. Gatien’s. “Well, what do we find? As soon as we get a whisper of civilization in Greece, we find Dædalus successful in flying. The pragmatic interpreters pretend that the fable does but point to the discovery of sails for ships; but I put it to you, is that probable?” “Obvious bosh,” said Barton. “And the meteorological mycologists, sir, _they_ maintain that Dædalus is only the lightning flying in the breast of the storm!” “There’s nothing those fellows won’t say,” replied Barton. “I’m glad you are with me, sir. In Dædalus _I_ see either a record of a successful attempt at artificial flight, or at the very least, the expression of an aspiration as old as culture. _You_ wouldn’t make Dædalus the evening clouds accompanying Minos, the sun, to his setting in Sicily, in the west?” added Winter anxiously. “I never heard of such nonsense,” said Barton. “Sir Frederick Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy, is with me, sir, if I may judge by his picture of Dædalus.” “Every sensible man must be with you,” answered Barton. “Well, sir, I won’t detain you with other famous flyers of antiquity, such as Abaris, mounted on an arrow, as described by Herodotus. Doubtless the arrow was a flying machine, a novelty to the ignorant Scythians.” “It _must_ have been, indeed.”