rots me. Everybody rots me.'

'But there is going to be flying--quite soon.'

The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that.
'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'

'You'll fly--lots of times--before you die,' the father assured him.

The little boy looked unhappy.

The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and
under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,' he said.

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and
a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like
object with flat wings on either side of it. It was the first record of
the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained itself in the
air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: 'Here we go up,
up, up--from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'

The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son.
'Well?' he said.

'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'

'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he
believed quite firmly to be omniscience. 'But old Broomie,' he said, 'he
told all the boys in his class only yesterday, "no man will ever fly."
No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would
ever believe anything of the sort....'

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father's
reminiscences.

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the
literature of that time witness, it was thought that the fact that man
had at last had successful and profitable dealings with the steam that
scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about the sky
at him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his
intelligence and his intellectual courage. The air of 'Nunc Dimittis'
sounds in same of these writings. 'The great things are discovered,'
wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the nineteenth century. 'For us
there remains little but the working out of detail.' The spirit of
the seeker was still rare in the world; education was unskilled,
unstimulating, scholarly, and but little valued, and few people even
then could have realised that Science was still but the flimsiest of
trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems to have
been afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had
been but