e by an amateur, at close quarters, of the actual machine's
mutterings had made, in its shed near the Crystal Palace. Bert found he
was trembling. "Lord" he said, "here am I and the whole blessed secret
of flying--lost up here on the roof of everywhere.

"Let's see!" He fell to studying the drawings and comparing them with
the photographs. They puzzled him. Half of them seemed to be missing.
He tried to imagine how they fitted together, and found the effort too
great for his mind.

"It's tryin'," said Bert. "I wish I'd been brought up to the
engineering. If I could only make it out!"

He went to the side of the car and remained for a time staring with
unseeing eyes at a huge cluster of great clouds--a cluster of slowly
dissolving Monte Rosas, sunlit below. His attention was arrested by a
strange black spot that moved over them. It alarmed him. It was a
black spot moving slowly with him far below, following him down there,
indefatigably, over the cloud mountains. Why should such a thing follow
him? What could it be?...

He had an inspiration. "Uv course!" he said. It was the shadow of the
balloon. But he still watched it dubiously for a time.

He returned to the plans on the table.

He spent a long afternoon between his struggles to understand them and
fits of meditation. He evolved a remarkable new sentence in French.

"Voici, Mossoo!--Je suis un inventeur Anglais. Mon nom est Butteridge.
Beh. oo. teh. teh. eh. arr. I. deh. geh. eh. J'avais ici pour vendre le
secret de le flying-machine. Comprenez? Vendre pour l'argent tout
suite, l'argent en main. Comprenez? C'est le machine a jouer dans l'air.
Comprenez? C'est le machine a faire l'oiseau. Comprenez? Balancer? Oui,
exactement! Battir l'oiseau en fait, a son propre jeu. Je desire de
vendre ceci a votre government national. Voulez vous me directer la?

"Bit rummy, I expect, from the point of view of grammar," said Bert,
"but they ought to get the hang of it all right.

"But then, if they arst me to explain the blessed thing?"

He returned in a worried way to the plans. "I don't believe it's all
here!" he said....

He got more and more perplexed up there among the clouds as to what he
should do with this wonderful find of his. At any moment, so far as he
knew he might descend among he knew not what foreign people.

"It's the chance of my life!" he said.

It became more and more manifest to him that it wasn't. "Directly I come
down they'll telegraph--put it