the
heat of the sun is absorbed, and the air in consequence rises.

In what state of emotion I was maintained by the letters of Georges
during the ensuing fortnight, I will make you judge.

"_A moi_!" he writes to me in the first week. "I am in the clutch of a
madman! Each morning I am awakened at six, that I may plunge with him
in the lake of cold water attached to the mansion, he having first
made _la boxe_ noisily with a fist ball on the floor directly above.
To-day in his machine he has described figures of eight in the space
of his grounds even, banking the planes at an inclination _affreuse_!"

Again he writes: "I am now to accompany him on a cross-country raid.
Farewell to my wife and little one. I will die like a Montmartrois for
the honor of France!"

Finally an appeal--urgent, pitiful, telegraphic:

"Take me away, _je t'en prie!_ This maniac wishes now to discuss the
possibility of a somersault in the air. I can no more--Georges."

Thereupon I replaced him with another mechanic, and he returned,
appearing worn and noticeably thinner.

"It seems to me, _tout de meme_," I remarked, "that this young
monsieur knows very well what he is about. We have not been asked to
repair a single stick of his machine."

"True," replied Georges. "But that is not his ambition, to break wood.
It was his neck that he wished to break, and incidentally my own.
Wait, my friend, until you have seen him fly. I, who speak to you,
have faced death daily these weeks past, and my clothes hang loose
upon me!"

And I was fated to see this monsieur, also, before very long, on the
occasion of his dramatic appearance upon the grounds of my flying
school. I must explain that Mineola had become a social institution,
for already I taught the younger members of the rich sportsman set
the new diversion that science had placed within their reach. Crowds
assembled each fine day to witness the first flutterings or the
finished flights of their friends.

On this occasion the lawn before the hangars was bright with flowers
and gay with the costumes of pretty women, in deference to whom I had
even permitted what the society reporters began to call "aviation
teas," placing little tables about the grass, where the chatter was
not too much interrupted by the vicious rattle and the driving smoke
of motors under test. I did this the more readily as it prevented
the uninstructed from wandering into the path of the machines, which
buzzed about the