ken. After a silent meal, we walked all the way home
without speaking.

We started off together on our triangles. That was in April, just
passed, so that I have now brought this casual diary almost up to
date. We were then at the great school of aviation at A---- in central
France, where, for the first time, we were associated with men in
training for every branch of aviation service, and became familiar
with other types of French machines. But the brevet tests, which every
pilot must pass before he becomes a military aviator, were the same
in every department of the school. The triangles were two
cross-country flights of two hundred kilometres each, three landings
to be made _en route_, and each flight to be completed within
forty-eight hours. In addition, there were two short voyages of sixty
kilometres each--these preceded the triangular tests--and an hour of
flight at a minimum altitude of sixty-five hundred feet.

The short voyages gave us a delightful foretaste of what was to come.
We did them both one afternoon, and were at the hangars at five
o'clock on the following morning, ready to make an early start. A
fresh wind was blowing from the northeast, but the brevet _moniteur_,
who went up for a short flight to try the air, came back with the
information that it was quite calm at twenty-five hundred feet. We
might start, he said, as soon as we liked.

Drew, in his joy, embraced the old woman who kept a coffee-stall at
the hangars, while I danced a one-step with a mechanician. Neither of
them was surprised at this procedure. They were accustomed to such
emotional outbursts on the part of aviators who, by the very nature
of their calling, were always in the depths of despair or on the
farthest jutting peak of some mountain of delight. Our departure had
been delayed, day after day, for more than a week, because of the
weather. We were so eager to start that we would willingly have gone
off in a blizzard.

During the week of waiting we had studied our map until we knew the
location of every important road and railroad, every forest, river,
canal, and creek within a radius of one hundred kilometres. We studied
it at close range, on a table, and then on the floor, with the
compass-points properly orientated, so that we might see all the
important landmarks with the birdman's eye. We knew our course so
well, that there seemed no possibility of our losing direction.

Our military papers had been given us several day