e in the air.

Other meetings followed in rapid succession, gaining recruits for the
new art and converting the nations to a belief in it. Two of these, held
simultaneously at Blackpool and Doncaster, soon after the Rheims
meeting, were spoilt by bad weather and high winds, but at Blackpool
Hubert Latham gave a marvellous display on his Antoinette machine by
flying in a wind of about forty miles an hour, when no one else ventured
the attempt. During 1910 aviation weeks were held in February at
Heliopolis, Egypt, and in April at Nice. In October of the same year an
International Aviation Tournament was held in America at Belmont Park,
Long Island, where the highest honour, the prize for the Gordon Bennett
speed contest, was won by Claude Grahame-White on a Bleriot machine. In
Great Britain many meetings were held during the summer of 1910: one at
Wolverhampton; another at Bournemouth, where the Hon. C. S. Rolls, who a
month before had flown across the Channel and back without alighting,
was killed; another at Lanark; and yet another at Blackpool, where
George Chavez flew to a height of 5,887 feet. In the following month
Chavez flew across the Alps, over the Simplon Pass, into Italy, but was
fatally injured in alighting at Domodossola. These are specimen deeds
only, taken from a story of adventure and progress, danger and disaster,
which, if it were fully told, would fill volumes. Records, as they are
called, were made and broken so fast that the heroic achievement of the
spring became the daily average performance of the ensuing autumn. The
movement was fairly under way, and nothing could stop it.

CHAPTER III

FLIGHT IN ENGLAND

In all these doings England bore but a small part. English aviators were
few; and those who distinguished themselves in public competition had
learned their flying in France. To speak of England's share in these
amazing years of progress is to tell the history of a backward parish,
and to describe its small contribution to a great world-wide movement.
Yet the story, for that very reason, has an extraordinary interest.
England never has been cosmopolitan. All her beginnings, even where she
has led the way and set the fashion to the world, were parochial. If a
change is in question, England makes trial of it, late and reluctantly,
on a small scale, in her own garden. All the noisy exhortations of a
thousand newspapers cannot touch her apprehension or rouse her to
excitement. Next year'