eds
had been sown which were to blossom into the keenest interest in the
real, serious work of the mastery of the air. Live, sterling young
fellows were in the Brighton Academy. Some of them had declared
allegiance to the army, some to the navy, but now here was a stouthearted
bunch of boys that had decided they would give themselves to the study
of aeronautics, and lose no time about it.

The seven spent a thoughtful afternoon. It was hard indeed for any
one of them to focus attention on his lessons. The newness of the
idea had to wear off first. After class hours they met again and
went off by themselves to a quiet spot on the cool, shady campus.
Seated in a circle on the grass, they talked long and earnestly of ways
and means for commencing their study of air-machines and airmen
systematically.

"This," said Jimmy Hill with a sigh of pure satisfaction, "is team-work.
My father said this morning that team-work counts most in this war.
If our team-work is good we will get on all right."

Team-work it certainly proved to be. It was astonishing, as the days
passed, how much of interest one or another of the seven could find
that had to do with the subject of flying. They took one other boy
into their counsels. Louis Deschamps was asked to join them and did
so with alacrity, it seemed to lend an air of realism to their scheme
to have the French boy in their number.

Dicky Mann's father had taken almost as great an interest in the idea
as had Dicky himself, and Mr. Mann's contributions were of the utmost
value.

Days and weeks passed, as school-days and school-weeks will. Looking
back, we wonder sometimes how some of those interims of our waiting
time were bridged. The routine work of study and play had to be gone
through with in spite of the preoccupation attendant on the art of
flying, as studied from prosaic print. It was a wonder, in fact,
that the little group from the boys of the Brighton Academy did not
tire of the researches in books and periodicals. They learned much.
Many of the articles were mere repetitions of something they had read
before. Some of them were obviously written without a scrap of
technical knowledge of the subject, and a few were absolutely
misleading or so overdrawn as to be worthless. The boys gradually
came to judge these on their merits, which was in itself a big step
forward.

The individual characteristics of the boys themselves began to show.
Three of them were of a