curred in private grounds or other enclosed places and,
under favourable conditions, and it was brought home to Grubb and
Bert Smallways only by means of the magazine page of the half-penny
newspapers or by cinematograph records. But it was brought home very
insistently, and in those days if, ever one heard a man saying in a
public place in a loud, reassuring, confident tone, "It's bound to
come," the chances were ten to one he was talking of flying. And Bert
got a box lid and wrote out in correct window-ticket style, and Grubb
put in the window this inscription, "Aeroplanes made and repaired." It
quite upset Tom--it seemed taking one's shop so lightly; but most of the
neighbours, and all the sporting ones, approved of it as being very good
indeed.

Everybody talked of flying, everybody repeated over and over again,
"Bound to come," and then you know it didn't come. There was a hitch.
They flew--that was all right; they flew in machines heavier than air.
But they smashed. Sometimes they smashed the engine, sometimes they
smashed the aeronaut, usually they smashed both. Machines that made
flights of three or four miles and came down safely, went up the next
time to headlong disaster. There seemed no possible trusting to them.
The breeze upset them, the eddies near the ground upset them, a passing
thought in the mind of the aeronaut upset them. Also they upset--simply.

"It's this 'stability' does 'em," said Grubb, repeating his newspaper.
"They pitch and they pitch, till they pitch themselves to pieces."

Experiments fell away after two expectant years of this sort of success,
the public and then the newspapers tired of the expensive photographic
reproductions, the optimistic reports, the perpetual sequence of triumph
and disaster and silence. Flying slumped, even ballooning fell away to
some extent, though it remained a fairly popular sport, and continued
to lift gravel from the wharf of the Bun Hill gas-works and drop it upon
deserving people's lawns and gardens. There were half a dozen reassuring
years for Tom--at least so far as flying was concerned. But that was the
great time of mono-rail development, and his anxiety was only diverted
from the high heavens by the most urgent threats and symptoms of change
in the lower sky.

There had been talk of mono-rails for several years. But the real
mischief began when Brennan sprang his gyroscopic mono-rail car upon the
Royal Society. It was the leading sensation of the 1