nd feet above Heligoland, in
full view of German territory, to the office of _The Morning_, he has
demonstrated the efficiency of his machine. If that is not sufficient,
Mr. Carville's next journey will convince Europe, if not England. If the
pettifogging Radical Government turn a deaf ear to our brilliant
correspondent, if they ignore his claims and chaffer in any commercial
spirit with his accredited agents, their days are numbered. It is hardly
too much to say that the days of the Empire are also numbered...."

* * * * *

Apart from our own private interest in the affair, the news did not
thrill. In America one's withers are unwrung by such scares. The
"exclusiveness" of Lord Cholme's information, indeed, defeated his
object. Lord Cholme, I knew, was loved neither in Fleet Street nor in
Park Place. His ruthless competition with the news agencies, his
capture of numerous cable-routes, had gradually divided England into two
classes: those who read _The Morning_ and those who didn't. Everyone
remembers the exclusive description of the destruction of Constantinople
in _The Morning_. No one was surprised to find that the following day
Constantinople was still alive and well. Clever young Oxford men who had
not succeeded in getting a post on _The Morning_, satirized the paper in
other journals who never paid more than two guineas a column. No doubt,
having been a newspaper man myself, I discounted the effect of the scare
upon the public. I could imagine the delicate raillery of the other
papers, if indeed they deigned to notice Lord Cholme's exclusive
information at all.

The special biography was as accurate as such biographies usually are.
It was written in a fair imitation of Mr. Kipling's racy colloquial
style and contained numerous references to the Empire, the White Man's
Burden and our "far-flung battle line." I suspected that Monsieur
D'Aubigne had supplied the basic "facts" which had been edited by Lord
Cholme before being handed on to "Vol-Plane," as the biographer called
himself.

I set the paper down and resumed my cigar. The drums and tramplings of
Lord Cholme's organ had revealed nothing fresh. I understand now why my
friends had merely mentioned the fact of its arrival and made no
comment. After all, our real interest lay in the man, not in his
aeroplane. We had never seen an aeroplane except in the cinema films,
but we were familiar enough with current events to feel no su