He awakened near noon next day. After breakfast he went out on a balcony in response to crowds in the street and for the first time after his triumph stood face to face in daylight with citizens of France. There was a burst of applause. As we have said, the first man to have flown from New York to Paris, was bound to get just this applause. Then something else happened. We talked to one of the Diplomatic Corps who witnessed this first public appearance. He said: “The people kept on cheering and clapping and waving their hats or handkerchiefs; but I suddenly had a feeling they were applauding mechanically, as if their attention were rooted on something that fascinated them. “I glanced up at Lindbergh to see if he were doing anything he shouldn’t do. No, he was just smiling and his ruddy face was alight with appreciation. “I looked from Lindbergh to the crowd. Then I realized that something was going on right before my eyes that I couldn’t see. Lindbergh’s personality was reaching out and winning the French just as surely as his flight had reached out and found their city.” That was the beginning of the “phenomenon of Lindbergh.” It grew in a steady crescendo as the days passed. We saw it full force in Washington. We saw it reach incredible heights in New York. Procession of events fitted into and abetted development of the situation. There was the telephone conversation from Paris to his mother in Detroit four thousand miles away. _His mother_: the world rolled the two words around its collective tongue as might a wine connoisseur his nectar. He called on Madame Nungesser, another mother, whose equally brave son had disappeared but a few days before in the stormy wastes of the same ocean he had crossed. Their exchange was brief, but the whole world listened and wiped away a tear. In simple compassion Lindbergh told the mother not to give up hope. You have to know the boy to feel a fraction of the reassurance he must have conveyed. He visited the blind and crippled veterans of the great war. He smiled at them; which was enough for those who could see, who in turn ransacked their expressive tongue to explain “_le joli Lindbergh_” to those who couldn’t. He called on the President of the Republic. He was dressed in plain clothes but the meeting was full of affability on both sides, with Sheldon Whitehouse of the Embassy acting as interpreter. The President pinned the Cross of the Legion of Honor upon the lapel of the boy’s borrowed suit and kissed him on both cheeks. By this time France was alive to Lindbergh; America was waking up.