was a gleaming swath hidden at times by patches of
luminous nimbus.

The engine stopped. There was the silence of the clouds, cushioned
silence, cushioned by the mist. Next, we were on a noiseless toboggan
and when we came to the end of a glide of a thousand feet or more,
France loomed ahead with its lacework of surf and an expanse of chalk
cliffs at an angle and landscape rising out of the haze. A few minutes
more and the salt thread that kept Napoleon out of England and has kept
Germany out of England was behind us. We were over the Continent of
Europe.

I had never before understood the character of both England and France
so well. England was many little gardens correlated by roads and lanes;
France was one great garden. Majestic in their suggestion of
spaciousness were those broad stretches of hedgeless, fenceless fields,
their crop lines sharply drawn as are all lines from a plane, fields
between the plots of woodland and the villages and towns, revealing a
land where all the soil is tilled.

Soon we were over camps that I knew and long, straight highways that I
had often traveled in my comings and goings. But how empty seemed the
roads where you were always passing motor trucks and guns! Long, gray
streaks with occasional specks which, as you rose to a greater height,
were lost like scattered beads melting into a ribbon! Reserve trenches
that I had known, too, were white tracings on a flat surface in their
standard contour of traverses. There was the chateau where I had lived
for months. Yes, I could identify that, and there the town where we went
to market.

We flew around the tower of a cathedral low enough to see the people
moving in the streets, and then, in a final long glide, after an hour
and fifty minutes in the air, the rubber wheels touched earth, rose and
touched it again before the steady old 'bus slowed down not far from
another plane that had arrived only a few minutes previously. When a day
of good weather follows a day of bad and the arrivals are frequent,
planes are flopping about this aerodrome like so many penguins before
they are marshaled by the busy attendants in line along the edge of the
field or under the shelter of hangars.

We had had none of those thrilling experiences which are supposed to
happen to aerial joy-riders, but had made a perfectly safe, normal trip,
which, I repeat, was the real point of this wonderful business of the
aerial ferry. I went into the office and officia