ermitted him to choose any course to New Haven. Thinking only of the
new route, taking time only to nod good-by to Martin Dockerill and
Hank Odell, he was off, into the air.

As the ground dropped beneath him and the green clean spaces and
innumerous towns of Long Island spread themselves out he listened to
the motor. Its music was clear and strong. Here, at least, the wind
was light.

He would risk the long over-water flight--very long they thought it in
1910.

In a few minutes he sighted the hills about Roslyn and began to climb,
up to three thousand feet. It was very cold. His hands were almost
numb on the control. He descended to a thousand feet, but the machine
jerked like a canoe shooting rapids, in the gust that swept up from
among the hills. The landscape rose swiftly at him over the ends of
the wings, now on one side, now on the other, as the machine rolled.

His arms were tired with the quick, incessant wing-warping. He rose
again. Then he looked at the Sound, and came down to three hundred
feet, lest he lose his way. For the Sound was white with fog.... No
wind out there!... Water and cloud blurred together, and the sky-line
was lost in a mass of somber mist, which ranged from filmy white to
the cold dead gray of old cigar-ashes. He wanted to hold back, not
dash out into that danger-filled twilight. But already he was roaring
over gray-green marshes, then was above fishing-boats that were slowly
rocking in water dully opaque as a dim old mirror. He noted two men on
a sloop, staring up at him with foolish, gaping, mist-wet faces.
Instantly they were left behind him. He rose, to get above the fog.
Even the milky, sulky water was lost to sight.

He was horribly lonely, abominably lonely.

At five hundred feet altitude he was not yet entirely above the fog.
Land was blotted out. Above him, gray sky and thin writhing filaments
of vapor. Beneath him, only the fog-bank, erupting here and there like
the unfolding of great white flowers as warm currents of air burst up
through the mist-blanket.

Completely solitary. All his friends were somewhere far distant, in a
place of solid earth and sun-warmed hangars. The whole knowable earth
had ceased to exist. There was only slatey void, through which he was
going on for ever. Or perhaps he was not moving. Always the same coil
of mist about him. He was horribly lonely.

He feared that the fog was growing thicker. He studied his compass
with straining eyes. He was s