The
apparatus was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge,
ascended there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped thence
very nearly back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep, rose again,
circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind the Burford
Bridge Inn. At its descent a curious thing happened. Filmer got off his
tricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke, advanced perhaps
twenty yards towards his triumph, threw out his arms in a strange
gesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint. Every one could then
recall the ghastliness of his features and all the evidences of extreme
excitement they had observed throughout the trial, things they might
otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards in the inn he had an unaccountable
gust of hysterical weeping.

Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and those for
the most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor saw the ascent but
not the descent, his horse being frightened by the electrical apparatus
on Filmer's tricycle and giving him a nasty spill. Two members of
the Kent constabulary watched the affair from a cart in an unofficial
spirit, and a grocer calling round the Marsh for orders and two lady
cyclists seem almost to complete the list of educated people. There were
two reporters present, one representing a Folkestone paper and the
other being a fourth-class interviewer and "symposium" journalist, whose
expenses down, Filmer, anxious as ever for adequate advertisement--and
now quite realising the way in which adequate advertisement may be
obtained--had paid. The latter was one of those writers who can throw
a convincing air of unreality over the most credible events, and his
half-facetious account of the affair appeared in the magazine page of
a popular journal. But, happily for Filmer, this person's colloquial
methods were more convincing. He went to offer some further screed upon
the subject to Banghurst, the proprietor of the New Paper, and one of
the ablest and most unscrupulous men in London journalism, and Banghurst
instantly seized upon the situation. The interviewer vanishes from
the narrative, no doubt very doubtfully remunerated, and Banghurst,
Banghurst himself, double chin, grey twill suit, abdomen, voice,
gestures and all, appears at Dymchurch, following his large, unrivalled
journalistic nose. He had seen the whole thing at a glance, just what it
was and what it might be.

At his touch, as it were, Filmer's lo