ordinarily belittle words, but framed in the romance of this voyage they wrought indescribable effects upon me. The economist was merged in the artist, I no longer reasoned but lay bathed in the flood of feeling. And not only these beauties enthralled me, but the motion of the Attila was itself a poem.

Have you never in the drowsy noon of a long summer's day lain back on the sward watching the evolutions of a rook round its elm, noted the rapturous poise of its wings and the easy grace of its flight? Even such was the flight of the Attila. Let me detail an incident which took place overnight, and the ground for my enthusiasm will be obvious. Hartmann had summoned me to his study, and

the Attila obeys its master. We require to load up with sand and refill five or six of the hydrogen compartments. That strip yonder is one of our favourite docks. Watch me."

He pressed one of the knobs communicating with the engine-room.

"That stops the force supply to the main shaft, the revolutions of which will speedily ease down. We are falling fast, do you observe? Hold tight. There!

The bow dipped several degrees and we shot onward and downward like an arrow. Were we rushing into the sea, the billows of which seemed to leap up at us larger and larger each second? Another pitch, the bow rose considerably and we were carried by the aeroplane hundreds of yards

upwards, the onward motion being at the same time inconceivably rapid. Once more these tactics were repeated, and so closely we neared the ocean that the waves must have splashed the screw blades. Meantime Hartmann rapidly twisted a wheel with each hand.

"This works the sand levers of the bow, that of the stern. Ballast is dropping quickly."

At once we rose, and to my unconcealed wonder stopped at a height of about 300 feet above sea-level, still, however, riding forward with a lazy careless motion. We were now near the sand-spits, whither a few turns of the screw bore us gently. Hartmann, watching his opportunity, began twisting a small wheel in the centre of a medley of others.

"A hydrogen valve."

We fell sharply, but a touch to the other wheels eased us, and alighting gently on the spit the wheels of the Attila were buried up to their naves.

It was then getting late, so every one was as expeditious as possible. First bag after bag of sand was dried and cast into the sand reservoirs, binding the craft immovably to the dune. The process resembled a coaling operation at Port Saïd, and amused me greatly. I worked hard and earned a shower of praises. Afterwards I stood by while the five huge centre compartments were filled with the rarefied gas. It was a tedious affair, because each in turn had to be pumped and re-pumped out, then filled with cold hydrogen, then with a fresh supply highly heated so as to contract and become rare on cooling. About one hour was consumed in the operation, and at its close the Attila still lay motionless on the sand-spit. Everything, however, having been duly overhauled, the sand levers were gently worked, the surplus ballast slipped away, and breaking away from our couch we floated twenty feet above the spit. The three screws were then set rotating, and speed having been attained, we curved upwards into the bosom of the sunset clouds. An experience more superb romance itself could not furnish.

Later on we passed at high speed over Havre, the lights of which twinkled merrily through a mist patch. Next Rouen glided away beneath us, and at seven we swept over the gorgeous city of Paris. Satiated in some measure with these sights I stepped down into a court and entered the cosy smoking-room.

Burnett was there, and Brandt, the "philosopher" whom Hartmann had mentioned. I was very fond of German thought, and did not fail to improve the timely occasion. Brandt was not only a metaphysician, but readily listened to my very guarded criticisms of the anarchists. He was, however, inflexible, and professed the most supreme confidence in Hartmann ! "He is the heart of the enterprise, and it was he who gave the Attila wings. Look at what he effected with small resources, and you may well rely on him with great." He evinced a sturdy faith in the scheme of supervision, and prophesied as its result a grand moral and intellectual regeneration of man. But, he added, the initial blows will be terrible. One remark filled me with apprehension. "London," he said, "in three days will be mere shambles with the roof ablaze."

"Heavens!" I cried, "so soon!"

"Yes. The object of this trip is merely to settle details with some terrestrial friends who meet us tomorrow evening-delegates from the various affiliated anarchist bodies of Europe."

Shortly afterwards I had an interview with Hartmann, and urged that some warning might at least be given to our friends.

"By all means," he remarked, "warn yours to keep away from London. One of the delegates will act for you after due inspection of the message. For myself, I have already taken my private precautions."

DIARY. Tuesday morning. Crossed Dijon and the river Saone in the night. Rising rapidly, as the slopes of the Jura mountains are ahead of us, and "the captain," as they call him, will insist on keeping high! No doubt it is safer, but I suspect the real truth is that he wants to appear unannounced over London-a portent as mysterious as terrible. Shows himself of action, and he asks me whether I aspire to ironical and inflexible. I suggest a mild course be captain of the Attila. Am becoming nevertheless almost inured to the thought of the impending calamity. Brandt says philosophically that "the advance of man is always over thorns." Unhappily the thorns do not always lead to happiness. Will they do so in this case? The bluster of the vulgar dynamitards is revolting. Even Burnett is forgetting the end in the means. As to Schwartz, his vile parody is being sung freely by all the Englishspeaking hyænas of his stamp :

"The dynamite falls on castle walls, And splendid buildings old in story, The column shakes, the tyrant quakes, And the wild wreckage leaps in glory. Throw, comrades, throw; set the wild echoes flying, Throw, comrades, answer wretches dying, dying, dying."

Am getting to loathe the crew, now the novelty of their reception is beginning to wear off.

Tuesday (Afternoon).-Still higher, great discomfort being experienced. The barometer readings make us three and a half miles above sea-level over the pine-covered summits of the Jura mountains. I find it necessary to breathe much more rapidly, the rarity of the air is unsatisfying. At times a dizziness seizes me, and on examining my hands and body I find my veins standing out like whipcord. Hartmann shortly eases off the screws--he was experimenting, so it appears, with his machinery. A change of tactics is observable. He ignores possible sightseers now, probably because he knows that reports from tourists and mountaineers stand no chance of being believed. Hence we almost brush the mountains, and a superb privilege it is. The magnificent pines here surpass anything else of the kind. Sometimes we glide midway along a valley with a rushing torrent beneath us and these pine-fringed precipices on our sides; sometimes we amaze a luckless mountaineer or shepherd as we thread a defile; sometimes we curve over valley-heads with a grace an eagle might imitate; then, again, we breast the cloud-rack and are lost in its mantling fleeces. We are now bearing south-east by south and are not far off from the beautiful lake of Geneva.

Tuesday (Night).-Wrote my letter and telegram and gave them to Hartmann for the delegate. We have stopped over a pine forest some five miles distant from Morges, on the shore of the lake. Switzerland, I am told, was selected as the rendezvous because of its cen

tral position. Many Russians, Poles, Austrians, and Italians, besides delegates from other nationalities, are expected. They are to arrange details of the forthcoming revolution. Had a friendly talk with Burnett, who once more tried to proselytise me. Told him if any one could shake my convictions it is Hartmann and not he. How bloodthirsty the men are getting! Query.-What if the lust for blood grows by what it feeds on? What if this crew gets out of hand? Happily, a strong man stands at the helm.

his instructions to the delegates, and most of the crew escort them. We are floating very near the ground in a rude clearing on the mountain side, two rope ladders and some cables link us with the soil. After several hours' conference below the delegates visit the Attila. Heavens! what desperadoes some look! Yet they control, so Burnett says, vast societies. Hartmann interviews each. He works patiently through the list, and, finally addresses them en masse, launching terms of the most animated invective against modern civilisation. Am, of course, excluded, but learn that everything has gone off admirably. Five of the delegates are to join the crew, the rest carry back their instructions. We start early in the morning. What a spectacle there is before us! However, two days' breathing time is something. Trust that delegate, whoever he is, will not forget the telegram and letter to Lena.

*

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IN AT THE DEATH.

DURING the return to England two incidents of note, both alike terrible, but terrible in widely different ways, chequered our voyage, and the first of these it will now be my task to detail.

Wealth of romance, witchery of mountain scenery, and panoramas of evervarying landscapes in the plains-whatever happiness can be gleaned from these was mine in bounteous plenty. Hitherto, however, the Attila had met with gentle winds and fairly clear skies; she was a gay butterfly by day and a listless moth by night. She had shortly to display to me her prowess as a rider of the tempest. This experience, along with its sequel of grim incident, impressed me deeply. I shall try to awake in the reader some echo of the emotions which it stirred into fervour within me.

No one, at any rate, could charge Hartmann with boring his unsolicited guest. Feasted as I had been with pictures, I was destined to be swept through ever novel galleries of natural marvels. I had anticipated that we should return by a like route to that by which we had arrived, but a pleasant reversal of this view was in store for me. Leaving the slopes of the Jura behind her, the Attila sped in a south-westerly direction across the department of Aisne, over Lyons, westward the extinct volcanoes of Auvergne, then curving

across

slightly to the south she leapt the river Dordogne, and, finally, passing at a great height over Bordeaux, reached the ocean rim over the desolate Landes which span the coast line betwixt the Garonne estuary and the Adour. Had I been exploring Central Africa in the interests of science, I should feel justified in presenting my observations at length. But the tracts beneath me being so familiar, such procedure would be both useless and troublesome. I must therefore leave the imaginative to put themselves in my place and picture these well-known districts transfigured by the romance of airtravelling.

as

In looking down on such natural maps one is transported with a sense of power and exultation that renders even homely sights attractive. Burnett, it is true, assured me that even this luxury of travel palls on one after a time. Judging from the indifference of the crew I should say that he had right on his side. But, whether my artistic appetite was abnormal or the banquet provided was not of the proper duration, I can only say that this part of my residence on the Attila always wore the livery of a gorgeous dream.

It was becoming dark when the pine forests and sand wastes of the Landes gave place to the rim of Biscay surf. In accordance with custom we rapidly began to descend and were soon coursing over the billows at a height of some 200 feet. It was one of those evenings which ordinarily favour melancholy and lassitude. Above us stretched inky layers of stratus or "fall" cloud, wrought of mists driven from the upper regions by the chills that hurried after the setting sun. The wind blew in gusts and preyed vampire-like on our energies-an electric tension of the atmosphere was becoming unmistakably manifest. Clouds were rising smoke-like from the ocean rim and mingling with the flatter masses overhead, and even as I gazed the waves seemed to flash whiter and whiter through the veil of the nether darkness. I was standing on the upper deck deck debating social problems with Brandt, greatly to the enjoyment of three of the crew who watched the contest. Some few yards in front of us the platform tapered off to a point at the convergence of the bow railings, and directly in front of this the hull sloped downwards and outwards to form the projecting ram. At the extremity of this, with crest barely visible from the

spot where my listeners were reclining, rose the conning tower like a horn on the snout of a rhinoceros. Amidships and astern hummed the forest of stays and props which hung us to the aeroplane, clustering thick over the rounded boss of the citadel now half shrouded in gloom. It was a scene to inspire the painter-this weird vessel and its weirder crew borne along between an angry welkin and the riotous surges of the ocean.

"Violent diseases often demand violent remedies," said Brandt, as he developed his favourite topic. "The surgeon may be gentle at heart, but he spares not the gangrenous limb. In modern times he has anæsthetics to soothe his patient, but did he shrink from his task when such artifices as these were unknown? Regard us anarchists as excising the foul ulcers of Humanity and as forced to perform that duty with no anæsthetics to aid us. Could we throw all London, all Paris, all Berlin, into a trance, how painless would be our surgery! But, unhappily, we have to confront struggling patients vividly sensitive to the knife. Nevertheless, for their own sakes, or rather the sake of Humanity, we must cut."

"But you overlook one important contrast. The surgeon lops off a limb or roots up an ulcer to save his patient's life or better his health. But you attack civilisation not to reform it but to annihilate it."

"That is true, but civilisation-your industrial civilisation-what is it? Not a system to be identified with the cause of human welfare and hence worth preserving in some form or other at all costs, but a mere vicious outgrowth prejudicial to that welfare as we conceive it. The test of the worth of a civilisation is its power to minister to human happiness. Judged by this standard your civilisation has proved a failure. Mankind rushed to her embraces in hope, fought its way thither through long and weary centuries, and has for a reward the sneers of a mistress as exacting as she is icy.

"The third day comes, a frost, a killing frost."

During the delivery of this harangue the wind had been steadily rising and it now began to shriek through the stays'in a fashion positively alarming. Foregoing further parley, I bent over the railing and strove to catch a glimpse of the angry sea-horses beneath us. But it was by this time too dark for the non-feline eye.

Hartmann had disappeared. I found my way after him into the tower, where he was standing, regulator in hand, with his eyes on the glass plate that looked forward into the night.

"We are rising," he said, laconically. "Look!"

A fan of vivid glory cleft the darkness. Illumined by the electric search-light great masses of driving vapour were rushing by us; but other sight there was none. Suddenly a second squall struck us, and the Attila rolled like a liner in a cyclone; the lurch was horrible, and for a moment I thought we were capsizing-it must have been one of at least forty-five degrees followed by a very slow recovery. Hartmann was busy over the medley of wheels, levers, and regulators.

"We are passing through the cloud-belt at a very high speed," he continued, as if the shock was a trifle. "My intention is, first, to let

you see a storm from the quiet zone above it, secondly, to rush downwards into it that the Attila may show her mettle."

I said nothing, for my feelings were in truth somewhat mixed. With the ascent portion of the programme I concurred heartily; the second I would gladly have abandoned, as it seemed to me so utterly foolhardy. But faint heart was not the commodity for Hartmann, and wishing to earn his favour through his respect I suppressed my fears resolutely. Not noticing my silence he kept on throwing in his comments on the situation. As the minutes wore on