eopathic method,--by lighting another
cigar. I didn't realise at all how loose my moral and nervous fibre had
become until I reached the practical side of my investigations and was
face to face with the necessity of finding out just how it felt to use a
glider and just what a man could do with one.

I got into this relaxed habit of living in spite of very real
tendencies in my nature towards discipline. I've never been in love with
self-indulgence. That philosophy of the loose lip and the lax paunch
is one for which I've always had an instinctive distrust. I like bare
things, stripped things, plain, austere and continent things, fine lines
and cold colours. But in these plethoric times when there is too much
coarse stuff for everybody and the struggle for life takes the form of
competitive advertisement and the effort to fill your neighbour's eye,
when there is no urgent demand either for personal courage, sound nerves
or stark beauty, we find ourselves by accident. Always before these
times the bulk of the people did not over-eat themselves, because they
couldn't, whether they wanted to do so or not, and all but a very few
were kept "fit" by unavoidable exercise and personal danger. Now, if
only he pitch his standard low enough and keep free from pride, almost
any one can achieve a sort of excess. You can go through contemporary
life fudging and evading, indulging and slacking, never really hungry
nor frightened nor passionately stirred, your highest moment a mere
sentimental orgasm, and your first real contact with primary and
elemental necessities, the sweat of your death-bed. So I think it was
with my uncle; so, very nearly, it was with me.

But the glider brought me up smartly. I had to find out how these things
went down the air, and the only way to find out is to go down with one.
And for a time I wouldn't face it.

There is something impersonal about a book, I suppose. At any rate I
find myself able to write down here just the confession I've never been
able to make to any one face to face, the frightful trouble it was to
me to bring myself to do what I suppose every other coloured boy in the
West Indies could do without turning a hair, and that is to fling myself
off for my first soar down the wind. The first trial was bound to be the
worst; it was an experiment I made with life, and the chance of death or
injury was, I supposed, about equal to the chance of success. I believed
that with a dawn-like lucidity.