highly popular with boys of North London. In these kites he made over
two hundred flights, reaching, on some occasions, an altitude of over
2000 feet. At all times of the day he could have been seen on the slopes
of the Palace Hill, hauling these strange-looking, bat-like objects
backward and forward in the wind. Reports of his experiments appeared
in the Press, but Cody was generally looked upon as a "crank". The
War Office, however, saw great possibilities in the kites for scouting
purposes in time of war, and they paid Cody L5000 for his invention.

It is a rather romantic story of how Cody came to take up experimental
work with kites, and it is repeated as it was given by a Mohawk chief to
a newspaper representative.

"On one occasion when Cody was in a Lancashire town with his Wild West
show, his son Leon went into the street with a parrot-shaped kite. Leon
was attired in a red shirt, cowboy trousers, and sombrero, and soon a
crowd of youngsters in clogs was clattering after him.

"'If a boy can interest a crowd with a little kite, why can't a man
interest a whole nation?' thought Cody--and so the idea of man-lifting
kites developed."

In 1903 Cody made a daring but unsuccessful attempt to cross the Channel
in a boat drawn by two kites. Had he succeeded he intended to cross the
Atlantic by similar means.

Later on, Cody turned his attention to the construction of aeroplanes,
but he was seriously handicapped by lack of funds. His machines
were built with the most primitive tools, and some of our modern
constructors, working in well-equipped "shops", where the machinery is
run by electric plant, would marvel at the work accomplished with such
tools as those used by Cody.

Most of Cody's flights were made on Laffan's Plain, and he took part in
the great "Round Britain" race in 1911. It was characteristic of the
man that in this race he kept on far in the wake of MM. Beaumont and
Vedrines, though he knew that he had not the slightest chance of winning
the prize; and, days after the successful pilot had arrived back at
Brooklands, Cody's "bus" came to earth in the aerodrome. "It's dogged as
does it," he remarked, "and I meant to do the course, even if I took a
year over it."

Of Cody's sad death at Farnborough, when practising in the ill-fated
water-plane which he intended to pilot in the sea flight round Great
Britain in 1913, we speak in a later chapter.

CHAPTER XXXII. Three Historic Flights

When th