is remarkable that Tom was the first to observe the new
development. But his gardening made him attentive to the heavens, and
the proximity of the Bun Hill gas-works and the Crystal Palace, from
which ascents were continually being made, and presently the descent of
ballast upon his potatoes, conspired to bear in upon his unwilling mind
the fact that the Goddess of Change was turning her disturbing attention
to the sky. The first great boom in aeronautics was beginning.

Grubb and Bert heard of it in a music-hall, then it was driven home to
their minds by the cinematograph, then Bert's imagination was stimulated
by a sixpenny edition of that aeronautic classic, Mr. George Griffith's
"Clipper of the Clouds," and so the thing really got hold of them.

At first the most obvious aspect was the multiplication of balloons.
The sky of Bun Hill began to be infested by balloons. On Wednesday and
Saturday afternoons particularly you could scarcely look skyward for a
quarter of an hour without discovering a balloon somewhere. And then one
bright day Bert, motoring toward Croydon, was arrested by the insurgence
of a huge, bolster-shaped monster from the Crystal Palace grounds, and
obliged to dismount and watch it. It was like a bolster with a broken
nose, and below it, and comparatively small, was a stiff framework
bearing a man and an engine with a screw that whizzed round in front and
a sort of canvas rudder behind. The framework had an air of dragging the
reluctant gas-cylinder after it like a brisk little terrier towing a
shy gas-distended elephant into society. The combined monster certainly
travelled and steered. It went overhead perhaps a thousand feet up
(Bert heard the engine), sailed away southward, vanished over the hills,
reappeared a little blue outline far off in the east, going now very
fast before a gentle south-west gale, returned above the Crystal Palace
towers, circled round them, chose a position for descent, and sank down
out of sight.

Bert sighed deeply, and turned to his motor-bicycle again.

And that was only the beginning of a succession of strange phenomena
in the heavens--cylinders, cones, pear-shaped monsters, even at last a
thing of aluminium that glittered wonderfully, and that Grubb, through
some confusion of ideas about armour plates, was inclined to consider a
war machine.

There followed actual flight.

This, however, was not an affair that was visible from Bun Hill; it was
something that oc