'Anyhow,' he said, 'I wish you wouldn't write about it.'

'You'll fly-lots of times-before you die,' the father assured

him.

The little boy lookedunhappy.

The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a

blurred and under-developed photograph. 'Come and look at this,'

he said.

The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream

and a meadow beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black,

pencil-likeobject with flat wings on either side of it. It was

the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that

ever maintained itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the

margin was written: 'Here we go up, up, up-from S. P. Langley,

Smithsonian Institution, Washington.'

The father watched theeffect of this reassuring document upon

his son. 'Well?' he said.

'That,' said the schoolboy, after reflection, 'is only a model.'

'Model to-day, man to-morrow.'

The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for

what he believed quite firmly to beomniscience. 'But old

Broomie,' he said, 'he told all the boys in his class only

yesterday, "no man will ever fly." No one, he says, who has ever

shot grouse or pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything

of the sort…'

Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his

father's reminiscences.

Section 7

At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages

in the literature of that time witness, it wasthought that the

fact that man had at last had successful and profitable dealings

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