tend to flying as part of the serious
business of the world.

Why fly around a little town like New York, or show your bright wings in
the light, or circle the Statue of Liberty for fun, when you are
reconstructing civilization, and binding a whole planet together, and
wrapping the heavens close down around the earth, and making railroads
everywhere out of the air? New York is always a little superficial and
funny about itself. All it needs to do, it seems to think, is to snap
its fingers at a man of genius anywhere on this broad world, whisper to
him pleasantly, and he will trot promptly up, of course, and do his
little turn for it.

But not Wilbur Wright. Wilbur Wright would not give two million people
an encore, or even come back to bow. As one looked over from Mount Tom
one could see all New York black and solid on the tops of its roofs and
houses looking up into a great hole of air for him, and Wilbur Wright
slipping quietly off down to Washington and leaving them there, a whole
great city under the sky, with its heads up!

A little experience like this has been what New York has needed for a
long time. It takes a scientist to do these things. I wish there were
some poet who would do as well. Even a prophet up above New York--or
seer of men and of years--glinting his wings in the light, the New York
_Sun_ and the _World_ and the _Times_ down below, all their opera-glasses
trained on him, and all those little funny reporters running helplessly
about, all the people pouring out from Doctor Parkhurst's church to
look up.... It would be something.

Probably there are very few capitals in the world--Paris, Berlin, or
London--that would not be profoundly stirred and possibly much improved
by having some man suddenly appear up over them, who would be so
interested in what he was doing that he would forget to notice whether
anybody was looking--who would be capable of slipping off quietly and
leaving an entire city with its heads up, and going on and attending to
business.

There have been times when we would have been relieved, some of us, if
the North Pole could have been discovered in this way and without large
audiences tagging. There are some of us who will never cease to regret
as long as we live that the North Pole could not have waited a little.
We would rather have had Wilbur Wright discover it. One can imagine how
he would do it: fly gracefully up to it all by himself, and discover it
some pleasant evening,