The youth flushed on hearing these words. He at once put his wings into a vigorous commotion, then threw his weight forward, poising on tiptoe at about forty-five degrees, and in another instant had swung clear of the ground. The wind-puff came, on which he soared almost still, and had risen to a hundred feet in surprisingly little time. When the current failed he climbed with a flapping of his wings to another, higher and higher, until at last the tutor had to shout at the top of his lungs to make the boy hear. It was a command to descend and demonstrate the way of other manœuvres, which the boy did, gliding down, wheeling, plunging, soaring, and finally, at a word from the instructor, coming to within about ten feet of earth. He then seemed with a sudden effort to shake the wind out of his sails, so to speak, and alighted so gently that I didn't hear his sandals touch the ground. Whatever the tutor may have thought of the performance, to our eyes it was bewildering, marvellous. I had all I could do to refrain from clapping my hands. 'Tell me,' cried Poyning, 'how far can these boys travel on their wings?' 'But a little way,' replied the old man. 'I do not think there is one student in the school who could fly out of this valley without becoming weary. But when long distances are to be flown we use other wings than these.' He spoke a few words in a low tone to the instructor, who nodded and gave a curt order to the boys nearest him. They ran to a large pavilion-like building near where we stood, threw open the doors, and carried out a pair of wings wider and apparently much heavier than those we had seen. I noticed at once that at the point where they joined, instead of the simple metal hingeing there was a curious shield-shaped contrivance, about eighteen inches broad by nine deep. 'These wings,' said Kalliboas, 'demand higher skill and strength than the others. No student is permitted to touch them until he has thoroughly learned to fly by his own exertions.' The tutor himself had donned the wings and risen into the air with an ease and grace beside which, as we now saw, the performance of his pupil had been merely elementary. For about five minutes he amazed us by evolutions that brought my heart into my mouth time and again: he somersaulted like a gymnast, tumbled like a tumbler pigeon, swooped almost to the level of our heads, then rocketed up as if he had been shot out of a catapult, and finally seemed to poise dead still in mid-air. He was making some readjustment of the wings. These immediately began to flap with swift sweeps, and the flier to hurtle down wind at a prodigious speed. During the few short minutes we watched him he must have traversed the whole width of the valley. He at last re-approached, glided to within a few feet of us, gave the wings that curious shake we had seen the student employ, and sank gently to earth.