ple--with a Bodley Booklet a-printing!--of
stealing. He has taken remarkable honours at the University--he went
through them with a sort of hasty slobber, as though he feared I might
interrupt him before he had told me all--and he spoke of taking his
D.Sc. as one might speak of taking a cab. And he asked what I was
doing--with a sort of comparative accent, and his arm was spread
nervously, positively a protecting arm, over the paper that hid the
precious idea--his one hopeful idea.

"'Poetry,' he said, 'Poetry. And what do you profess to teach in it,
Hicks?'

"The thing's a Provincial professorling in the very act of budding, and
I thank the Lord devoutly that but for the precious gift of indolence I
also might have gone this way to D.Sc. and destruction..."

A curious little vignette that I am inclined to think caught Filmer in
or near the very birth of his discovery. Hicks was wrong in anticipating
a provincial professorship for Filmer. Our next glimpse of him is
lecturing on "rubber and rubber substitutes," to the Society of Arts--he
had become manager to a great plastic-substance manufactory--and at
that time, it is now known, he was a member of the Aeronautical
Society, albeit he contributed nothing to the discussions of that body,
preferring no doubt to mature his great conception without external
assistance. And within two years of that paper before the Society of
Arts he was hastily taking out a number of patents and proclaiming in
various undignified ways the completion of the divergent inquiries which
made his flying machine possible. The first definite statement to that
effect appeared in a halfpenny evening paper through the agency of a man
who lodged in the same house with Filmer. His final haste after his long
laborious secret patience seems to have been due to a needless panic,
Bootle, the notorious American scientific quack, having made an
announcement that Filmer interpreted wrongly as an anticipation of his
idea.

Now what precisely was Filmer's idea? Really a very simple one. Before
his time the pursuit of aeronautics had taken two divergent lines, and
had developed on the one hand balloons--large apparatus lighter than
air, easy in ascent, and comparatively safe in descent, but floating
helplessly before any breeze that took them; and on the other, flying
machines that flew only in theory--vast flat structures heavier than
air, propelled and kept up by heavy engines and for the most part
smashin