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The rocks to the eastward of us had grown dim. A gull flew by overhead uttering wailing cries. The graceful terns had disappeared. A cormorant, flying so low that its wing-tips broke the water, sped across our bows to some far resting-place. I fell into a mood of real sympathy with stories about mermaids. I think Peter felt the change which had come over me.

The moonlight flooded them full, caught glitter and gleam from wing-sockets, shot shimmer and sheen from wing-tips, sent cataracts of iridescent color pulsing between. Snow-silver one, brilliant green and gold another, dazzling blue the next, luminous orange a fourth, flaming flamingo scarlet the last, their colors seemed half liquid, half light.

"Yes, but what, John Barclay what?" exclaimed the general. "That's what I want to know. What are you going to do for him? Make him a devil worshipper?" "Well now, General, here don't be too fast," Barclay smiled and drawled. He put his hands on the warm rocks at his sides and flapped them like wing-tips as he went on: "Jeanette and Neal have their own lives to live.

Once in awhile, either in hunger or in sport, he would rise swiftly at the claws or wing-tips of a dipping swallow; but he never managed to catch the nimble bird. Had he, by any chance, succeeded, he would probably have found the feathers no obstacle to his enjoyment of the novel fare. At times it was not a shadow, but a splash, that would attract his attention to the shining roof of his world.

These had wings swept backward and also upturned at the wing-tips which, though it gave a certain measure of automatic stability, rendered the machine somewhat clumsy in the air, and their performances were not on the whole as high as those of either France or Great Britain.

The outer plane-ends of the machine have indeed, when a turn is being made, a natural tendency to "bank" as it is called, or tilt upward; the reason being that, as the machine swings round, these outer plane-ends, moving faster for the moment than the wing-tips on the inside of the turn, exercise a greater lift, and have an inclination to rise.

Before leaving the work of the brothers to consider contemporary events, it may be noted that they claimed with justice that they were first to construct wings adjustable to different angles of incidence on the right and left side in order to control the balance of an aeroplane; the first to attain lateral balance by adjusting wing-tips to respectively different angles of incidence on the right and left sides, and the first to use a vertical vane in combination with wing-tips, adjustable to respectively different angles of incidence, in balancing and steering an aeroplane.

On its side an airplane will cushion its own bank of proper degree by the use of ailerons. These ailerons are sections of the wing-tips which may be moved either up or down. They are counterbalanced so that movement of the left down gives you the right aileron up.

As the machine came back to an even keel, and he knew that he was now wholly in the invisible stream, he readjusted the wing-tips, rapidly away from him during the several moments of his discomfiture. The pigeon drove straight on for the Alameda County shore, and it was near this shore that Winn had another experience. He fell into an air-hole.

"Well, I'm done with the whole business right now," Bud continued firmly. "Find that it gets too much of a hold on my mind to bother with while I'm still going to school. Day and night I couldn't think of anything but monoplanes, cylinders, drag brakes, propellers, guy wires, wing-tips, levers, barographs, barometers, searchlights, volplaning and all such stuff. It was wearing on my mind, you see.