nsion. And he is the Greatest
Discoverer of This or Any Age--the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any
Age! What strikes one so forcibly about him is that he didn't somehow
quite expect it ever, at any rate, not at all like this. Banghurst is
about everywhere, the energetic M.C. of his great little catch, and
I swear he will have every one down on his lawn there before he has
finished with the engine; he had bagged the prime minister yesterday,
and he, bless his heart! didn't look particularly outsize, on the very
first occasion. Conceive it! Filmer! Our obscure unwashed Filmer, the
Glory of British science! Duchesses crowd upon him, beautiful, bold
peeresses say in their beautiful, clear loud voices--have you noticed
how penetrating the great lady is becoming nowadays?--'Oh, Mr. Filmer,
how DID you do it?'

"Common men on the edge of things are too remote for the answer. One
imagines something in the way of that interview, 'toil ungrudgingly
and unsparingly given, Madam, and, perhaps--I don't know--but perhaps a
little special aptitude.'"

So far Hicks, and the photographic supplement to the New Paper is in
sufficient harmony with the description. In one picture the machine
swings down towards the river, and the tower of Fulham church appears
below it through a gap in the elms, and in another, Filmer sits at his
guiding batteries, and the great and beautiful of the earth stand around
him, with Banghurst massed modestly but resolutely in the rear. The
grouping is oddly apposite. Occluding much of Banghurst, and looking
with a pensive, speculative expression at Filmer, stands the Lady Mary
Elkinghorn, still beautiful, in spite of the breath of scandal and her
eight-and-thirty years, the only person whose face does not admit a
perception of the camera that was in the act of snapping them all.

So much for the exterior facts of the story, but, after all, they are
very exterior facts. About the real interest of the business one is
necessarily very much in the dark. How was Filmer feeling at the time?
How much was a certain unpleasant anticipation present inside that
very new and fashionable frock-coat? He was in the halfpenny, penny,
six-penny, and more expensive papers alike, and acknowledged by the
whole world as "the Greatest Discoverer of This or Any Age." He had
invented a practicable flying machine, and every day down among the
Surrey hills the life-sized model was getting ready. And when it was
ready, it followed as