foresaid little
gentleman could only produce ten shillings, the negotiation came to
nothing,--and I, who had coveted from my cradle the privilege that a
bird enjoys from his nest, was fortunately refused that juvenile voyage
in the clouds: whereof when I told my excellent mother, her tearful joy
that I had _not_ made the perilous ascent affectionately consoled my
disappointment.

So it is that, as often happens throughout life, and I am a living proof
of it, our Failures prove to be the best Successes: for certainly if my
boyish whim had been granted, and I had thereafter taken habitually to
such aeronautical flights, at once perilous and unsettling, that young
Carthusian would scarcely have stood before you this day as an ancient
Proverbial Philosopher.

However, let that pass: I only acted--as oftentimes I since have longed
to act--on the desire we all feel to have "the wings of a dove, and fly
away and be at rest,"--floating afar from the dross and dust of earth
into the blue expanse of the heavenly ether:--a thing yet to be
accomplished!--or I will confess to be no prophet: in these days of
electricity, concentrated and accumulative after the fashion of M.
Faure, aided perhaps by some lighter gas, some condensed form of tamed
dynamite,--these elevating and motive powers being helped by exquisite
mechanism either as attached to the human form (if the flier be an
athlete) or quickening a vehicle with flapping wings impelled by
electricity, in which he might sit (if said flier is as burdened with
"too solid flesh" as some of us)--these mixed potencies, I say, of
electricity and gas, ought at this time of the day to be so manipulated
by our chemists and mechanicians as to issue--very soon too--in the
grand invention than would supersede every other sort of
locomotion,--human flight.

I once met at Baltimore, and since elsewhere, a clever young American
mathematician and engineer, Henry Middleton by name, who showed me, at
his father's place in South Carolina, parts of a model energised by the
motive-powers of gas and electricity, which he hoped would successfully
solve the problem of flying; but the Patent Office at Washington was
burnt down soon after, and in it I fear was his machine. At all events I
have heard nothing of his project since.

I may mention, too, that I believe I have among my audience this evening
Mr. De Lisle Hay, the author not only of that recent very graphic book
"Brighter Britain," but also o