ew. If they had not done justice to his erotic bellowings and
gesticulations, he stuck in, in a large inky scrawl, all and more than
they had omitted.

It was a strangely embarrassing thing for British journalism. Never was
there a more obvious or uninteresting affair; never had the world heard
the story of erratic affection with less appetite or sympathy. On the
other hand it was extremely curious about Mr. Butteridge's invention.
But when Mr. Butteridge could be deflected for a moment from the cause
of the lady he championed, then he talked chiefly, and usually
with tears of tenderness in his voice, about his mother and his
childhood--his mother who crowned a complete encyclopedia of maternal
virtue by being "largely Scotch." She was not quite neat, but nearly so.
"I owe everything in me to me mother," he asserted--"everything. Eh!"
and--"ask any man who's done anything. You'll hear the same story. All
we have we owe to women. They are the species, sorr. Man is but a dream.
He comes and goes. The woman's soul leadeth us upward and on!"

He was always going on like that.

What in particular he wanted from the Government for his secret did not
appear, nor what beyond a money payment could be expected from a modern
state in such an affair. The general effect upon judicious observers,
indeed, was not that he was treating for anything, but that he was using
an unexampled opportunity to bellow and show off to an attentive world.
Rumours of his real identity spread abroad. It was said that he had been
the landlord of an ambiguous hotel in Cape Town, and had there given
shelter to, and witnessed, the experiments and finally stolen the papers
and plans of, an extremely shy and friendless young inventor named
Palliser, who had come to South Africa from England in an advanced stage
of consumption, and died there. This, at any rate, was the allegation
of the more outspoken American press. But the proof or disproof of that
never reached the public.

Mr. Butteridge also involved himself passionately in a tangle of
disputes for the possession of a great number of valuable money prizes.
Some of these had been offered so long ago as 1906 for successful
mechanical flight. By the time of Mr. Butteridge's success a really
very considerable number of newspapers, tempted by the impunity of the
pioneers in this direction, had pledged themselves to pay in some cases,
quite overwhelming sums to the first person to fly from Manchester to
G