nfess that I started on that flight in a state--I
won't say of fury, but of a most intense irritation. I don't remember
ever feeling so annoyed in my life.

It came about in this way. Two or three days before, I had been invited
to lunch at an R.N.A.S. station, and was made to feel very much at home
by the nicest lot of quietly interesting young men it had ever been my
good fortune to meet. Then I was taken into the sheds. I walked
respectfully round and round a lot of machines of all kinds, and the more
I looked at them the more I felt somehow that for all the effect they
produced on me they might have been so many land-vehicles of an eccentric
design. So I said to Commander O., who very kindly was conducting me:
"This is all very fine, but to realise what one is looking at, one must
have been up."

He said at once: "I'll give you a flight to-morrow if you like."

I postulated that it should be none of those "ten minutes in the air"
affairs. I wanted a real business flight. Commander O. assured me that
I would get "awfully bored," but I declared that I was willing to take
that risk. "Very well," he said. "Eleven o'clock to-morrow. Don't be
late."

I am sorry to say I was about two minutes late, which was enough,
however, for Commander O. to greet me with a shout from a great distance:
"Oh! You are coming, then!"

"Of course I am coming," I yelled indignantly.

He hurried up to me. "All right. There's your machine, and here's your
pilot. Come along."

A lot of officers closed round me, rushed me into a hut: two of them
began to button me into the coat, two more were ramming a cap on my head,
others stood around with goggles, with binoculars. . . I couldn't
understand the necessity of such haste. We weren't going to chase Fritz.
There was no sign of Fritz anywhere in the blue. Those dear boys did not
seem to notice my age--fifty-eight, if a day--nor my infirmities--a gouty
subject for years. This disregard was very flattering, and I tried to
live up to it, but the pace seemed to me terrific. They galloped me
across a vast expanse of open ground to the water's edge.

The machine on its carriage seemed as big as a cottage, and much more
imposing. My young pilot went up like a bird. There was an idle, able-
bodied ladder loafing against a shed within fifteen feet of me, but as
nobody seemed to notice it, I recommended myself mentally to Heaven and
started climbing after the pilot. The close vie