g of a breeze
on a quiet day; nothing started it, it came. People began to talk of
flying with an air of never having for one moment dropped the subject.
Pictures of flying and flying machines returned to the newspapers;
articles and allusions increased and multiplied in the serious
magazines. People asked in mono-rail trains, "When are we going to fly?"
A new crop of inventors sprang up in a night or so like fungi. The Aero
Club announced the project of a great Flying Exhibition in a large
area of ground that the removal of slums in Whitechapel had rendered
available.

The advancing wave soon produced a sympathetic ripple in the Bun Hill
establishment. Grubb routed out his flying-machine model again, tried it
in the yard behind the shop, got a kind of flight out of it, and broke
seventeen panes of glass and nine flower-pots in the greenhouse that
occupied the next yard but one.

And then, springing from nowhere, sustained one knew not how, came a
persistent, disturbing rumour that the problem had been solved, that
the secret was known. Bert met it one early-closing afternoon as he
refreshed himself in an inn near Nutfield, whither his motor-bicycle had
brought him. There smoked and meditated a person in khaki, an engineer,
who presently took an interest in Bert's machine. It was a sturdy piece
of apparatus, and it had acquired a kind of documentary value in these
quick-changing times; it was now nearly eight years old. Its points
discussed, the soldier broke into a new topic with, "My next's going
to be an aeroplane, so far as I can see. I've had enough of roads and
ways."

"They TORK," said Bert.

"They talk--and they do," said the soldier.

"The thing's coming--"

"It keeps ON coming," said Bert; "I shall believe when I see it."

"That won't be long," said the soldier.

The conversation seemed degenerating into an amiable wrangle of
contradiction.

"I tell you they ARE flying," the soldier insisted. "I see it myself."

"We've all seen it," said Bert.

"I don't mean flap up and smash up; I mean real, safe, steady,
controlled flying, against the wind, good and right."

"You ain't seen that!"

"I 'AVE! Aldershot. They try to keep it a secret. They got it right
enough. You bet--our War Office isn't going to be caught napping this
time."

Bert's incredulity was shaken. He asked questions--and the soldier
expanded.

"I tell you they got nearly a square mile fenced in--a sort of valley.
Fences of barbe