is powerful.

“Anna Hawkes.”

“How absurd!” exclaimed Elinor. “She is queer. I am certain of it.”

“Anyhow,” pursued Billie, “I am ashamed of what we did now. I suppose it must have hurt her awfully.”

“Not more than she hurt us when she scolded us for forgetting those awful dates,” said Nancy relentlessly.

“Oh, well,” put in Miss Campbell, “she is just an angry old spinster who got obsessed with dates and then had a rude awakening. I don’t think it was exactly respectful to have given the lady a box of dried dates. But she brought it on herself, as you say. Tear up the letter and forget all about it. I have no doubt she is a perfectly harmless old person.”

Miss Campbell always had a secret contempt for other spinsters.

“But she isn’t old, you know, cousin. She’s just out of college.”

“Oh, indeed. I imagined she was a crusty old maid.”

“Perhaps she has reference to the powerful family of chicken hawks,” observed Nancy.

“Or the illustrious fish-hawk family, only they are mostly centered around New Haven,” added Mary.

“How about the tomahawk family?” suggested Billie.

How, indeed? But there was no answer to this strangely pertinent question because of a timely incident which now occurred.

With the picture still in their minds of a great fish hawk skimming through the air, as they had often seen him do at home, there now came a sound of whirring far above them.

Nancy leaned out of the automobile and looked up.

“Oh! oh!” she exclaimed in great excitement “Oh, stop—look! What is it?”

Billie stopped the car and they jumped out into the road, craning their necks as they scanned the heavens.

Flying westward, but still some distance away, came what resembled at first a gigantic bird with wings outspread, soaring even as the fish hawk soars, as he skims through the air.

“It’s an aeroplane,” whispered Billie, almost speechless with excitement.

They seemed to be alone in the great flat world of green fields. To the right and left of them stretched level fields now cultivated and yielding great crops of corn and wheat. Less than a hundred years ago what would those travelers in lumbering wagons across the prairies have thought if they had seen such a bird flying overhead?

On sailed the flying machine, like a huge dragon fly above them. In the clear atmosphere which is peculiar to this prairie region they could plainly see a human being riding it. Then, the birdman, as if he were not already high enough to see the whole world stretched out beneath him, began slowly to rise in the blue ether like a skylark at dawn. Up, up he went, until he was merely a black speck in the heavens.

Miss Campbell sat flat down at the side of the road.

“I can’t endure it,” she cried. “Suppose he should never come back.”

“What goes up must come down,” observed Mary in a low voice much too excited to speak naturally.

Immediately fulfilling her prophetic remark, the flying machine sailed back into view. It was some distance beyond them now, but even so far they could hear the clicking noise which was all the more accentuated because no other sound followed. The motor had ceased to whir. They saw the aeroplanist fumble frantically with the machinery, then suddenly, with a twist of its body that was almost swifter than the eye, the flying machine turned its nose earthward and shot straight down.

“Is that the way he lands?” demanded Miss Campbell.

“No, no,” answered Billie excitedly as she hastened to crank the machine. “Get in quickly—everybody! Something must be broken. He may be hurt.”

Another moment they were tearing down the road toward the field where they had seen the flying machine drop.

“There he is,” cried Nancy, already on the step of the Comet as Billie drew up at the side of the road.

Now, unfortunately, a wire fence separated the field from the road to prevent idle wandering people from trampling down the young wheat. It was no easy matter to crawl through the interstices of barbed wire, and Billie, in her haste, tore a great gaping hole in her automobile coat.

But she pulled off the wrap with the recklessness of a young person who has something far more interesting on hand than pongee coats, and flung it in the road where it was rescued by Miss Campbell.

In the middle of the field lay the flying machine, looking very much like an enormous kite at close range. But where was the human being who so lately had been mounting high into the air?

A man’s foot sticking out from the midst of the debris revealed him at last lying huddled up under the machine.

It was no simple matter to untangle him from the ruins, and it took all their strength and courage, too, with that face so white and still turned upward, but, by the grace of Providence, which watches over the lives of some rash beings, the young man was not even hurt. He was only stunned, and presently Miss Campbell, who had managed somehow to crawl through the fence, brought him back to life with her smelling salts.

“If I can only keep from sneezing,” he began, opening his eyes and blinking them in amazement when he beheld the faces of five ladies leaning over him in states of more or less extreme excitement.

The aeroplanist was really almost a boy and rather small. He had reddish brown hair and reddish brown eyes to match. His features were regular. His mouth firm and well modeled, and he had a square, determined-looking jaw.

“Oh,” he exclaimed. “Then it wasn’t a dream. I did sneeze.”

The girls privately thought his mind was wandering.

“You tumbled down out of the sky,” said Nancy.

“Are you better now?” asked Miss Campbell, applying her smelling salts to his nose.

“I’m all right,” he answered, bewildered, and began slowly to pull himself together and get up. He staggered a little as he rose and stood looking ruefully down at the demolished aeroplane. They noticed that he was not dressed like a messenger from Mars, as they had seen aeroplanists attired in pictures. He wore brown clothes and a brown tie the same shade as his hair, and a brown cap with a vizor which had fallen on the ground.

“It is very kind of you ladies to come to my rescue,” he said as his senses returned. “I was getting on famously with the thing when I sneezed. I felt it coming on, but it couldn’t be stopped, and I lost control and shot down like a piece of lead. Aeroplanists will have to stop sneezing until something more reliable in the way of a flying machine is invented.”

“What are you going to do with this?” asked Billie, pointing to the demolished machine.

“Nothing,” he answered. “It’s all in, as far as I can see.”

“Oh, then may we have a souvenir?” demanded Nancy.

“Help yourself,” he said, smiling faintly and pressing his hand to his head, which was still buzzing with the shock of the fall.

“You poor boy,” exclaimed Miss Campbell, “come right along and let us take you somewhere. You are suffering of course, and these foolish girls are thinking of souvenirs.”

While the others assisted him across the field, Nancy lingered beside the flying machine and presently selected a piece of the machinery; you would probably be no wiser if I told you what piece it was, and certainly Nancy herself was as ignorant of its purpose as a cat of a sewing machine. She chose it because it