either unreasonable or unworthy either the Giver or receiver. Hence I propose to keep on asking and expecting, receiving all with a full measure of thankfulness, joining in the Universal Song of Life until I am called to higher joys in whatever of His larger and better world He desires me to enter. Thus, no matter through how many lives I may live, I am determined on Singing through them all with God.

CHAPTER XXXI

THE SONG OF THE AEROPLANES

How many wonderful songs the arts and sciences of mechanics have sung to mankind, and sent out in volume to join the Universal Symphony! Archimedes with his lever; the Pyramid Builders with their power to make and place concrete and remove heavy stones; the iron-casters of early India; the temple builders of ancient Hindustan, Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece and Rome; the wonderful road-builders of ancient Rome; the engineers of historic viaducts in India, Egypt and Rome; the first builders of ships; Tubal Cain and his fellow-workers in iron; the first miners and smelters of minerals; the fellers of trees and workers in wood; the first weavers and builders of looms; the first makers of baskets-these and many others sang their songs of discovery, of joy in their inventions, and their useful applications, in which songs they were joined by those who benefited from them until their tuneful echoes are heard clearly by us to this day.

Modern mechanics, however, began when Watt discovered the steam-engine. In rapid succession came the railway and its marvelous developments,

the steamboat and its helpful binding of far-apart nations closer together. Then came Franklin, Morse, Bell, Edison, Tesla, Pupin, Marconi, with electricity and its wonders, and the telegraph, transoceanic cable, telephone, wireless and phonograph were born. Later came the automobile engine, with its swift generation of gas from the electric spark of the storage battery, its rapid rotation of the generator of power and consequent development of speed. This made the conquest of the air possible, and Montgomery, Langley, the Wrights, Curtiss and others in England, France and Germany speedily made the aeroplane as marvelous a success in the air as the steamboat was on the ocean and the railway engine on land.

Prior, however, to the discovery of the automobile engine which alone, it should not be forgotten, has made the aeroplane possible-the conquest of the air called loudly to a few daring, visionary and adventurous souls. It was my exceeding good fortune to spend two years in almost daily and nightly intercourse with that man of commanding genius, Professor Thaddeus S. C. Lowe, who, as a boy in the fields of pastoral New Hampshire, lying on his back, used to watch the hawks and eagles swooping down from their eyries on Mt. Washington and longed to emulate them in their swift movement through the air. How earnestly, how passionately he longed to fly.

When the Civil War broke out he was but a young

man, yet he had studied what a few men in the past had done with balloons, he had made several in which he had successfully ascended, sailed for a number of miles and safely descended, and, with that penetrating intellect of his, he began to discern possibilities that would be helpful to his government if he were given the opportunity to put them into exercise. Through the personal interest of President Lincoln this was done, and balloons were built, made constant ascents, and thus secured invaluable information for the benefit of the Federal army. Professor Lowe invented his own processes of telegraphing from the air, and may truthfully be called the "father" of the practical science of aeronautics as used in war.

But he fully realized the limitations of the balloon. He knew no one better-that until an engine was invented, light enough to be carried, with all its equipment, into the air, and yet powerful enough in its operation to propel the airship in any and every direction required, the operation of balloons would be restricted to very limited usefulness. It was with keen delight, therefore, he hailed the advent of the automobile engine. In it he saw the assurance of being able to carry out his long fostered vision of crossing the Atlantic, or any other ocean, in a monster airship of balloon design, that he would. construct. With studious forethought and care he planned his new airship, but to his profound grief and astonishment, he could not secure financial aid

to construct and launch it. Made indifferent by our apparent freedom from the possibility of war, and allured by the new developments of the heavier-thanair flying machines, his invention and the accumulated knowledge he had acquired in his three thousand or more ascensions were disregarded. Unfortunately for the country he passed away before the storm of the Great War burst so unexpectedly upon the world. Hence the vision of his mighty and tested intellect which had also invented the processes of making artificial gas which are followed throughout the world; the ice-making machine; the refrigeration of steamships; and had built the Mt. Lowe Railway, a marvel of engineering skill, near Pasadena, California-his latest and greatest vision lies, untested and unknown, in the archives of the patent office in Washington.

In the meantime, however, Montgomery, the Wright Brothers, Curtiss, Langley and others were experimenting with the flying machine. As soon as success actually crowned the earlier efforts and aeroplanes, propelled by machinery, arose and sailed through the air, money for development and improvement poured in with rapidity so that there has been no delay in bringing them to a high state of perfection. The war gave added speed to development, so that in ten years progress has been made that, under the indifference most men show to an undeveloped vision, would have required a hundred.