leading London papers--he was singularly not adapted for inspiring

hall-porters with confidence--and he positively attempted to induce

the War Office to take up his work with him. There remains a

confidential letter from Major-General Volleyfire to the Earl of Frogs.

"The man's a crank and a bounder to boot," says the Major-General

in his bluff, sensible, army way, and so left it open for the Japanese

to secure, as they subsequently did, the priority in this side

of warfare--a priority they still to our great discomfort retain.



And then by a stroke of luck the membrane Filmer had invented for his

contractile balloon was discovered to be useful for the valves

of a new oil-engine, and he obtained the means for making a trial

model of his invention. He threw up his rubber factory appointment,

desisted from all further writing, and, with a certain secrecy

that seems to have been an inseparable characteristic of all his

proceedings, set to work upon the apparatus. He seems to have

directed the making of its parts and collected most of it in a room

in Shoreditch, but its final putting together was done at Dymchurch,

in Kent. He did not make the affair large enough to carry a man,

but he made an extremely ingenious use of what were then called

the Marconi rays to control its flight. The first flight of this

first practicable flying machine took place over some fields

near Burford Bridge, near Hythe, in Kent, and Filmer followed

and controlled its flight upon a specially constructed motor tricycle.



The flight was, considering all things, an amazing success.

The apparatus was brought in a cart from Dymchurch to Burford Bridge,

ascended there to a height of nearly three hundred feet, swooped

thence very nearly back to Dymchurch, came about in its sweep,

rose again, circled, and finally sank uninjured in a field behind

the Burford Bridge Inn. At its descent a curious thing happened.

Filmer got off his tricycle, scrambled over the intervening dyke,

advanced perhaps twenty yards towards his triumph, threw out

his arms in a strange gesticulation, and fell down in a dead faint.

Every one could then recall the ghastliness of his features and

all the evidences of extreme excitement they had observed throughout

the trial, things they might otherwise have forgotten. Afterwards

in the inn he had an unaccountable gust of hysterical weeping.



Altogether there were not twenty witnesses of this affair, and

those for the most part uneducated men. The New Romney doctor

saw the ascent but not the descent, his horse being frightened

by the electrical apparatus on Filmer's tricycle and giving him

a nasty spill. Two members of the Kent constabulary watched

the affair from a cart in an unofficial spirit, and a grocer calling

round the Marsh for orders and two lady cyclists seem almost

to complete the list of educated people. There were two reporters

present, one representing a Folkestone paper and the other being

a fourth-class interviewer and "symposium" journalist, whose

expenses down, Filmer, anxious as ever for adequate advertisement



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