By arrangement with the government, the Flying Ring was moved to a large aerodrome beyond the city, where its mysteries were protected from public curiosity by a steel fence, thirty feet high, outside which, both by day and night, armed guards were constantly on patrol. For, in the Flying Ring and in Professor Hooker, the government of the United States realized that it possessed not only the key to permanent peace but to the safety and prosperity of mankind as a whole. It may be said quite confidently that the head on anybody other than Professor Hooker would have been completely turned. Daily there arrived at his boarding-house various ambassadorial representatives of foreign nations, who conferred upon him, in the name of their governments or monarchs, the highest decorations in their gift. But, as became a true American, he thought little of these decorations, and simply threw their crosses and other insignia into an empty and not very clean bureau drawer. All this fuss and feathers took, in his opinion, a confounded lot of time and interfered with the serious business of life. Yet his very modesty operated to increase his notoriety. Here was a shabby little man, with tousled brown hair, double-lensed spectacles, and a protruding Adam's apple--the most famous man in the world; nay, the most celebrated man since the creation--who, for simplicity and diffidence, surpassed both U. S. Grant and Admiral Dewey, who was content to go on wearing the same very baggy eighteen-dollar suit of clothes for years, and to live in a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom, when his picture hung in every kitchen from the Atlantic seaboard to the Pacific coast. But, to speak accurately, Bennie Hooker was not so much disregardful of these things as he was oblivious of them, for when he was not working in the Congressional Library or the Smithsonian Institution, he was wandering around Washington with his eyes on the ground or in the air, engrossed in working out some spatial problem and totally unaware that he was being pointed out at every corner as: "That's him! That's Hooker!"