holes burned by the sparks from his pipe. We had taken a rough road. Like all those inexperienced with the element, I suppose, I had always thought that flying through the air would be smoother than sailing the calmest sea known to the tropical doldrums. Experience left another illusion ruthlessly shattered. It was a fitful, blustery day, with a high wind that rocked and tossed us about like a dory on a heavy sea; moreover, at irregular intervals averaging perhaps a minute apart the machine struck an air current that bounced us high off our precarious perches in the cockpit as a “thank-you-ma’am” tosses into one another’s laps the back-seat passengers in an automobile. The sickening drop just beyond each such ridge in the air road gave one the same unpleasant sensation of vacancy in the middle of the body that comes with the too sudden descent of an elevator. Particularly was this true when the pilot, in jockeying with the playful air waves, shut off his motor until he had regained his chosen altitude. There may be nothing more serious about a faulty carburetor a thousand yards aloft than on the ground, but the novice in aerial navigation is apt to listen with rapt attention to anything that ever so briefly suggests engine trouble. Yet none of these little starts reached the height of fear. There was something efficient about the ex-raider who sat at the controls with all the assurance of a long-experienced chauffeur that would have made fright seem absurd. I did get cold feet, it is true, but in the literal rather than the figurative sense. After a May of unbroken sunshine, early June had turned almost bitter cold, and the thin board floor of the cockpit was but slight protection against the wintry blasts. Every now and then we ran through a rain-storm, but so swiftly that barely a drop touched us. Between them the sun occasionally flashed forth and mottled the earth-carpet beneath with fleeing cloud shadows. Now the clouds charged past close over our heads, now we dived headlong into them; when we were clear of them they moved as does a landscape seen from a swift train—those near at hand sped swiftly to the rear, those farther off rode slowly forward, seeming to keep pace with us. Villages by the score were almost constantly visible, reddish-gray specks like rosettes embroidered at irregular intervals into the carpet pattern. It made one feel like a “Peeping Tom” to look down into their domestic activities from aloft. The highways between them seemed even more erratic in their courses than on the ground, and aroused still more wonder than the pedestrian would have felt as to what excuse they found for their strange deviations. Gnatlike men and women were everywhere toiling in the fields and only rarely ceased their labors to glance upward as we droned by overhead. Many enticing subjects for my kodak rode tantalizingly southward into the past, emphasizing at least one advantage of the tramp over the passenger of the air.