f the
real martyrs of aviation, this sapless, oldish man, never knowing the joy
of the air, yet devoting a lifetime of ability to helping man sprout wings
and become superman.

His generosity did not extend to living-quarters. Most of the students
lived at the hangars and dined on Hamburg sandwiches, fried eggs, and
Mexican _enchiladas_, served at a lunch-wagon anchored near the field.
That lunch-wagon was their club. Here, squatted on high stools,
treating one another to ginger-ale, they argued over torque and angles
of incidence and monoplanes _vs._ biplanes. Except for two unpopular
aristocrats who found boarding-houses in San Mateo, they slept in the
hangars, in their overalls, sprawled on mattresses covered with
horse-blankets. It was bed at eight-thirty. At four or five Carmeau
would crawl out, scratch his beard, start a motor, and set every
neighborhood dog howling. The students would gloomily clump over to
the lunch-wagon for a ham-and-egg breakfast. The first flights began
at dawn, if the day was clear. At eight, when the wind was coming up,
they would be heard in the workshop, adjusting and readjusting,
machining down bearings, testing wing strength, humming and laughing
and busy; a life of gasoline and hammers and straining attempts to get
balance exactly right; a happy life of good fellows and the
achievements of machinery and preparation for daring the upper air; a
life of very ordinary mechanics and of sheer romance!

It is a grievous heresy that aviation is most romantic when the
aviator is portrayed as a young god of noble rank and a collar high
and spotless, carelessly driving a transatlantic machine of perfect
efficiency. The real romance is that a perfectly ordinary young man,
the sort of young man who cleans your car at the garage, a prosaically
real young man wearing overalls faded to a thin blue, splitting his
infinitives, and frequently having for idol a bouncing ingenue,
should, in a rickety structure of wood and percale, be able to soar
miles in the air and fulfil the dream of all the creeping ages.

In English and American fiction there are now nearly as many
aeroplanes as rapiers or roses. The fictional aviators are society
amateurs, wearers of evening clothes, frequenters of The Club,
journalists and civil engineers and lordlings and international agents
and gentlemen detectives, who drawl, "Oh yes, I fly a bit--new
sensation, y' know--tired of polo"; and immediately thereafter use the
ae