up at him through the
paling darkness. A sign-board showed that he was a few miles from
Mineola. Letting the coming dawn uplift him, he tramped into Mineola,
with a half-plan of going on to the near-by Hempstead Plains Aviation
Field, to see if there was any early-morning flying. It would be bully
to see a machine again!

At a lunch-wagon he ordered buckwheat-cakes and coffee. Sitting on a
high stool before a seven-inch shelf attached to the wall, facing an
array of salt-castors and catsup-bottles and one of those colored
glass windows with a portrait of Washington which give to all
lunch-wagons their air of sober refinement, Carl ate solemnly,
meditatively.... It did not seem to him an ignoble setting for his
grief; but he was depressed when he came out to a drab first light of
day that made the street seem hopeless and unrested after the night.
The shops were becoming visible, gray and chilly, like a just-awakened
janitor in slippers, suspenders, and tousled hair. The pavement was
wet. Carl crossed the street, stared at the fly-specked cover of a
magazine six months old that lay in a shop window lighted by one
incandescent. He gloomily planned to go back and have another cup of
coffee on the shelf before Washington's glassy but benign face.

But he looked down the street, and all the sky was becoming a delicate
and luminous blue.

He trotted off toward Hempstead Plains.

The Aviation Field was almost abandoned. Most of the ambitious line of
hangars were empty, now, with faded grass thick before the great doors
that no one ever opened. A recent fire had destroyed a group of five
hangars.

He found one door open, and three sleepy youngsters in sweaters and
khaki trousers bringing out a monoplane.

Carl watched them start, bobbed his chin to the music of the motor,
saw the machine canter down the field and ascend from dawn to the
glory of day. The rising sun picked out the lines of the uninclosed
framework and hovered on the silvery wing-surface. The machine circled
the field at two hundred feet elevation, smoothly, peacefully. And
peace beyond understanding came to Carl.

He studied the flight. "Mm. Good and steady. Banks a little sharp, but
very thorough. Firs' rate. I believe I could get more speed out of her
if I were flying. Like to try."

Wonderingly he realized that he did not want to fly; that only his
lips said, "Like to try." He was almost as much an outsider to
aviation as though he had never flown.