helmed with applicants. Biplanes of the Farman and
Voisin type would make excellent family cars, quite safe for women to
drive. Mothers, busy with household affairs, could tell their children
to "run out and fly" a Caudron such as I was driving, and feel not the
slightest anxiety about them. I remembered an imaginative drawing I
had once seen of aerial activity in 1950. Even house pets were granted
the privilege of traveling by the air route. The artist was not far
wrong except in his date. He should have put it at 1925. On a fine
April morning there seemed no limit to the realization of such
interesting possibilities.

I had no more than started on my southwest course, as it seemed to me,
when I saw the spires and the red-roofed houses of C----, and, a
kilometre or so from the outskirts, the barracks and hangars of the
aviation school where I was to make the first landing. I reduced the
gas, and, with the motor purring gently, began a long, gradual
descent. It was interesting to watch the change in the appearance of
the country beneath me as I lost height. Checkerboard patterns of
brown and green grew larger and larger. Shining threads of silver
became rivers and canals, tiny green shrubs became trees, individual
aspects of houses emerged. Soon I could see people going about the
streets and laundry-maids hanging out the family washing in the back
gardens. I even came low enough to witness a minor household
tragedy--a mother vigorously spanking a small boy. Hearing the whir of
my motor, she stopped in the midst of the process, whereupon the
youngster very naturally took advantage of his opportunity to cut and
run for it. Drew doubted my veracity when I told him about this. He
called me an aerial eavesdropper and said that I ought to be ashamed
to go buzzing over towns at such low altitudes, frightening
housemaids, disorganizing domestic penal institutions, and generally
disturbing the privacy of respectable French citizens. But I was
unrepentant, for I knew that one small boy in France was thinking of
me with joy. To have escaped maternal justice with the assistance of
an aviator would be an event of glorious memory to him. How vastly
more worth while such a method of escape, and how jubilant Tom Sawyer
would have been over such an opportunity when his horrified warning,
"Look behind you, aunt!" had lost efficacy.

Drew had been waiting a quarter of an hour, and came rushing out to
meet me as I taxied across the field