“So you think a flying machine impossible, sir, and me, I presume, a fanatic? Well, well, you have Eusebius with you. ‘Such an one,’ he says—meaning me, and inventors like me—‘is a little crazed with the humors of melancholy.’”

The speaker was the man whom Barton had rescued from the cogs and wheels and springs of an infuriated engine. Barton could not but be interested in the courage and perseverance of this sufferer, whom he was visiting in hospital. The young surgeon had gone to inspect the room in Paterson’s Rants, and had found it, as he more or less expected, the conventional den of the needy inventor. Our large towns are full of such persons. They are the Treasure Hunters of cities and of civilization—the modern seekers for the Philosopher’s Stone. At the end of a vista of dreams they behold the great Discovery made perfect, and themselves the winners of fame and of wealth incalculable.

For the present, most of these visionaries are occupied with electricity. They intend to make the lightning a domestic slave in every house, and to turn Ariel into a common carrier. But, from the aspect of Winter’s den in Paterson’s Rents, it was easy to read that his heart was set on a more ancient foible. The white deal book-shelves, home-made, which lined every wall, were packed with tattered books on mechanics, and especially on the art of flying. Here you saw the spoils of the fourpenny box of cheap bookvendors mixed with volumes in better condition, purchased at a larger cost. Here—among the litter of tattered pamphlets and well-thumbed “Proceedings” of the Linnean and the Aeronautic Society of Great Britain—here were Fredericus Hermannus’ “De Arte Volandi,” and Cayley’s works, and Hatton Turner’s “Astra Castra,” and the “Voyage to the Moon” of Cyrano de Bergerac, and Bishop Wilkins’s “DÆdalus,” and the same sanguine prelate’s “Mercury, The Secret Messenger.” Here were Cardan and Raymond Lully, and a shabby set of the classics, mostly in French translations, and a score of lucubrations by French and other inventors—Ponton d’Amocourt, Borelli, Chabrier, Girard, and Marey.

Even if his books had not shown the direction of the new patient’s mind—(a man is known by his books at least as much as by his companions, and companions Winter had none)—even if the shelves had not spoken clearly, the models and odds-and-ends in the room would have proclaimed him an inventor. As the walls were hidden by his library, and as the floor, also, was littered with tomes and pamphlets and periodicals, a quantity of miscellaneous gear was hung by hooks from the ceiling.

Barton, who was more than commonly tall, found his head being buffeted by big preserved wings of birds and other flying things—from the sweeping pinions of the albatross to the leathery covering of the bat. From the ceiling, too, hung models, cleverly constructed in various materials; and here—a cork with quills stuck into it, and with a kind of drill-bow—was the little flying model of Sir George Cayley. The whole place, dusty and musty, with a faded smell of the oil in birds’ feathers, was almost more noisome than curious. When Barton left it, his mind was made up as to the nature of Winter’s secret, or delusion; and when he visited that queer patient in hospital, he was not surprised either by his smattered learning or by his golden dreams.

“Yes, sir; Eusebius is against me, no doubt,” Winter went on with his eager talk. “An acute man—rather too acute, don’t you think, for a Father of the Church? That habit he got into of smashing the arguments of the heathen, gave him a kind of flippancy in talking of high matters.”

“Such as flying?” put in Barton.

“Yes; such as our great aim—the aim of all the ages, I may call it. What does Bishop Wilkins say, sir? Why, he says, (I doubt not but that flying in the air may be easily effected by a diligent and ingenious artificer.) ‘Diligent,’ I may say, I have been; as to ‘ingenious,’ I leave the verdict to others.”

“Was that Peter Wilkins you were quoting?” asked Barton, to humor his man.

“Why, no sir; the Bishop was not Peter. Peter Wilkins is the hero of a mere romance, in which, it is true, we meet with women—Goories he calls them—endowed with the power of flight. But they were born so. We get no help from Peter Wilkins: a mere dreamer.”

“It doesn’t seem to be so easy as the Bishop fancies?” remarked Barton, leading him on.

“No, sir,” cried Winter, all his aches and pains forgotten, and his pale face flushed with the delight of finding a listener who did not laugh at him. “No, sir; the Bishop, though ingenious, was not a practical man. But look at what he says about the weight of your flying machine! Can anything be more sensible? Borne out, too, by the most recent researches, and the authority of Professor Pettigrew Bell himself. You remember the iron fly made by Begimontanus of Nuremberg?”

“The iron fly!” murmured Barton. “I can’t say I do.”

“You will find a history of it in Bamus. This fly would leap from the hands of the great Begimontanus, flutter and buzz round the heads of his guests assembled at supper, and then, as if wearied, return and repose on the finger of its maker.”

“You don’t mean to say you believe that?” asked Barton.

“Why not, sir; why not? Did not Archytas of Tarenturn, one of Plato’s acquaintances, construct a wooden dove, in no way less miraculous? And the same Regimontanus, at Nuremberg, fashioned an eagle which, by way of triumph, did fly out of the city to meet Charles V. But where was I? Oh, at Bishop Wilkins. Cardan doubted of the iron fly of Regimontanus, because the material was so heavy. But Bishop Wilkins argues, in accordance with the best modern authorities, that the weight is no hindrance whatever, if proportional to the motive power. A flying machine, says Professor Bell, in the Encyclopodia Britannica—(you will not question the authority of the Encyclopodia Britannica?)—a flying machine should be ‘a compact, moderately heavy, and powerful structure.’ There, you see, the Bishop was right.”

“Yours was deuced powerful,” remarked Barton. “I did not expect to see two limbs of you left together.”

“It is powerful, or rather it was,” answered Winter, with a heavy sigh; “but it’s all to do over again—all to do over again! Yet it was a noble specimen. ‘The passive surface was reduced to a minimum,’ as the learned author in the Encyclopodia recommends.”

“By Jove! the passive surface was jolly near reduced to a mummy. You were the passive surface, as far as I could see.”

“Don’t laugh at me, please sir, after you’ve been so kind. All the rest laugh at me. You can’t think what a pleasure it has been to talk to a scholar,” and there was a new flush on the poor fellow’s cheek, and something watery in his eyes.

“I beg your pardon, my dear sir,” cried Barton, greatly ashamed of himself. “Pray go on. The subject is entirely new to me. I had not been aware that there were any serious modern authorities in favor of the success of this kind of experiment.”

“Thank you, sir,” said Winter, much encouraged, and taking Barton’s hand in his own battered claw; “thank you. But why should we run only to modern authorities? All great inventions, all great ideas, have been present to men’s minds and hopes from the beginning of civilization. Did not Empedocles forestall Mr. Darwin, and hit out, at a stroke, the hypothesis of natural selection?”

“Well, he did make a shot at it,” admitted Barton, who remembered as much as that from “the old coaching days,” and college lectures at St. Gatien’s.

“Well, what do we find? As soon as we get a whisper of civilization in Greece, we find DÆdalus successful in flying. The pragmatic interpreters pretend that the fable does but point to the discovery of sails for ships; but I put it to you, is that probable?”

“Obvious bosh,” said Barton.

“And the meteorological mycologists, sir, they maintain that DÆdalus is only the lightning flying in the breast of the storm!”

“There’s nothing those fellows won’t say,” replied Barton.

“I’m glad you are with me, sir. In DÆdalus I see either a record of a successful attempt at artificial flight, or at the very least, the expression of an aspiration as old as culture. You wouldn’t make DÆdalus the evening clouds accompanying Minos, the sun, to his setting in Sicily, in the west?” added Winter anxiously.

“I never heard of such nonsense,” said Barton.

“Sir Frederick Leighton, the President of the Royal Academy, is with me, sir, if I may judge by his picture of DÆdalus.”

“Every sensible man must be with you,” answered Barton.

“Well, sir, I won’t detain you with other famous flyers of antiquity, such as Abaris, mounted on an arrow, as described by Herodotus. Doubtless the arrow was a flying machine, a novelty to the ignorant Scythians.”

“It must have been, indeed.”

“Then there was the Greek who flew before Nero in the circus; but he, I admit, had a bad fall, as Seutonius recounts. That character of Lucian’s, who employed an eagle’s wing and a vulture’s in his flight, I take to be a mere figment of the satirist’s imagination. But what do you make of Simon Magus? He, I cannot doubt, had invented a machine in which, like myself, he made use of steam or naphtha. This may be gathered from Arnobius, our earliest authority. He mentions expressly currum Simonis Magi et quadrigas igneas, the chariot of Simon Magus and his vehicles of flame—clearly the naphtha is alluded to—which vanished into air at the word of the Apostle Peter. The latter circumstances being miraculous, I take leave to doubt; but certainly Simon Magus had overcome the difficulties of aerial navigation. But, though Petrus Crinitus rejects the tradition as fabulous, I am prepared to believe that Simon Magus actually flew from the Capitol to the Aventine!

“‘The world knows nothing of its greatest men,’” quoted Barton.

“Simon Magus has been the victim, sir, of theological acrimony, his character blackened, his flying machine impugned, or ascribed, as by the credulous Arnobius, to diabolical arts. In the dark ages, naturally, the science of Artificial Flight was either neglected or practised in secret, through fear of persecution. Busbequius speaks of a Turk at Constantinople who attempted something in this way; but he (the Turk, I mean), was untrammelled by ecclesiastical prejudice. But why should we tarry in the past? Have we not Mr. Proctor with us, both in Knowledge and the Cornhill? Does not the preeminent authority, Professor Pettigrew Bell, himself declare, with the weight, too, of the Encyclopodia Britannica, that ‘the number of successful flying models is considerable. It is not too much to expect,’ he goes on, ‘that the problem of artificial flight will be actually solved, or at least much simplified.’ What less can we expect, as he observes, in the land of Watt and Stephenson, when the construction of flying machines has been ‘taken up in earnest by practical men?’”

“We may indeed,” said Barton, “hope for the best when persons of your learning and ingenuity devote their efforts to the cause.”

“As to my learning, you flatter me,” said Winter. “I am no scholar; but an enthusiast will study the history of his subject Did I remark that the great Dr. Johnson, in these matters so sceptical, admits (in a romance, it is true) the possibility of artificial flight? The artisan of the Happy Valley expected to solve the problem in one year’s time. ‘If all men were equally virtuous,’ said this artist, ‘I should with equal alacrity teach them all to fly.’”

“And you will keep your secret, like Dr. Johnson’s artist?”

“To you I do not mind revealing this much. The vans or wings of my machine describe elliptic figures of eight.”

“I’ve seen them do that, said Barton.

“Like the wings of birds; and have the same forward and downward stroke, by a direct piston action. The impetus is given, after a descent in air—which I effected by starting from a height of six feet only—by a combination of heated naphtha and of india rubber under torsion. By steam alone, in 1842, Philips made a model of a flying-machine soar across two fields. Penaud’s machine, relying only on india rubber under torsion, flies for some fifty yards. What a model can do, as Bishop Wilkins well observes, a properly weighted and proportioned flying-machine, capable of carrying a man, can do also.”

“But yours, when I first had the pleasure of meeting you, was not carrying you at all.”

“Something had gone wrong with the mechanism,” answered Winter, sighing. “It is always so. An inventor has many things to contend against. Remember Ark-wright, and how he was puzzled hopelessly by that trifling error in the thickness of the valves in his spinning machine. He had to give half his profits to Strutt, the local blacksmith, before Strutt would tell him that he had only to chalk his valves! The thickness of a coating of chalk made all the difference. Some trifle like that, depend on it, interfered with my machine. You see, I am obliged to make my experiments at night, and in the dark, for fear of being discovered and anticipated. I have been on the verge—nay, over the verge—of success. ‘No imaginable invention,’ Bishop Wilkins says, ‘could prove of greater benefit to the world, or greater glory to the author.’ A few weeks ago that glory was mine!”

“Why a few weeks ago?” asked Barton. “Was your machine more advanced then than when I met you?”

“I cannot explain what had happened to check its motion,” said Winter, wearily; “but a few weeks ago my machine acted, and I may say that I knew the sensations of a bird on the wing.”

“Do you mean that you actually flew?”

“For a very short distance, I did indeed, sir!”

Barton looked at him curiously: two currents of thought—one wild and credulous, the other practical and professional—surged and met in his brain. The professional current proved the stronger for the moment.

“Good-night,” he said. “You are tiring and over-exciting yourself. I will call again soon.”

He did call again, and Winter told him a tale which will be repeated in its proper place.