shed that which had been declared
impossible.

[Illustration: THE MOTOR AND BASKET OF "SANTOS-DUMONT NO. 9"
The gasoline holder, from which a tube leads to the motor, can be seen
on the side of the basket.]

The following winter the aerial navigator, in the same No. 5, sailed
many times over the waters of the Mediterranean from Monte Carlo. These
flights over the water, against, athwart, and with the wind, some of
them faster than the attending steamboats could travel, continued until
through careless inflation of the balloon the air-ship and navigator
sank into the sea. Santos-Dumont was rescued without being harmed in the
least, and the air-ship was preserved intact, to be exhibited later to
American sightseers.

"Santos-Dumont No. 6," the most successful of the series built by the
determined Brazilian, looks as if it were altogether too frail to
intrust with the carrying of a human being. The 105-foot-long balloon, a
light yellow in colour, sways and undulates with every passing breeze.
The steel piano wires by which the keel and apparatus are hung to the
balloon skin are like spider-webs in lightness and delicacy, and the
motor that has the strength of eighteen horses is hardly bigger than a
barrel. A little forward of the motor is suspended to the keel the
cigar-shaped gasoline reservoir, and strung along the top rod are the
batteries which furnish the current to make the sparks for the purpose
of exploding the gas in the motor.

Santos-Dumont himself says that the world is still a long way from
practical, everyday aerial navigation, but he points out the apparent
fact that the dirigible balloon in the hands of determined men will
practically put a stop to war. Henri Rochefort has said: "The day when
it is established that a man can direct an air-ship in a given direction
and cause it to maneuver as he wills--there will remain little for the
nations to do but to lay down their arms."

The man who has done so much toward the abolishing of war can rest well
content with his work.

HOW A FAST TRAIN IS RUN

The conductor stood at the end of the train, watch in hand, and at the
moment when the hands indicated the appointed hour he leisurely climbed
aboard and pulled the whistle cord. A sharp, penetrating hiss of
escaping air answered the pull, and the train moved out of the great
train-shed in its race against time. It was all so easy and comfortable
that the passengers never thought of the work and stu