should fly. In August flying and Filmer and flying and parachutes
and aerial tactics and the Japanese Government and Filmer and again
flying, shouldered the war in Yunnan and the gold mines of
Upper Greenland off the leading page. And Banghurst had given
ten thousand pounds, and, further, Banghurst was giving five thousand
pounds, and Banghurst had devoted his well-known, magnificent
(but hitherto sterile) private laboratories and several acres of land
near his private residence on the Surrey hills to the strenuous
and violent completion--Banghurst fashion--of the life-size
practicable flying machine. Meanwhile, in the sight of privileged
multitudes in the walled-garden of the Banghurst town residence
in Fulham, Filmer was exhibited at weekly garden parties putting
the working model through its paces. At enormous initial cost,
but with a final profit, the New Paper presented its readers
with a beautiful photographic souvenir of the first of these occasions.

Here again the correspondence of Arthur Hicks and his friend Vance
comes to our aid.

"I saw Filmer in his glory," he writes, with just the touch of envy
natural to his position as a poet passe. "The man is brushed
and shaved, dressed in the fashion of a Royal-Institution-Afternoon
Lecturer, the very newest shape in frock-coats and long patent shoes,
and altogether in a state of extraordinary streakiness between
an owlish great man and a scared abashed self-conscious bounder
cruelly exposed. He hasn't a touch of colour in the skin of his face,
his head juts forward, and those queer little dark amber eyes of his
watch furtively round him for his fame. His clothes fit perfectly
and yet sit upon him as though he had bought them ready-made.
He speaks in a mumble still, but he says, you perceive indistinctly,