and had taken the move as being one in the right direction.

In the news that the revolution, the storm clouds of which had long been ominously rumbling had actually broken out, the boys had an intense and vital interest. Their father’s banana plantation, one of the largest and best known in Central America, lay inland about twenty miles from Greytown, a seacoast town, on the San Juan River. The boys were on their way there after a long and trying season of flights and adulation to rest up and continue, in the quiet they had hoped to find there, a series of experiments in aviation which had already made them among the most famous graduates the Agassiz High School on Washington Heights had turned out in its years of existence. Already in their flights at White Plains, and later during the Hudson-Fulton celebration, the boys had earned, and earned well, laurels that many an older experimenter in aviation might have worn with content, but they were intent on yet further distinction. Already they had given several trials to a wireless telegraph appliance for attachment to aeroplanes and the Golden Eagle in some private flights had had this apparatus in use. The results had been encouraging in the extreme. With the use of a greater lifting surface the boys felt that they would be justified in adding to the weight the aeroplane could lift and that this weight would be in form of additional power batteries for the wireless outfit both had agreed. In the boxes piled on the foredeck they had indeed a supply of balloon silk, canvas, wire, spruce stretchers and aluminum frames which they intended to put into use as soon as they should reach Nicaragua in the furtherance of their experiments. The conquest of the air both in aviation and communication was the lofty goal the boys had set themselves.

“The revolution has really started at last, old boy—hurray!” shouted Harry, throwing his arm in boyish enthusiasm about his staid brother Frank, as both boys eagerly assimilated the news.

“I say, Frank,” he continued eagerly, “it’s always been our contention that an aeroplane capable of invariable command by its operator would be of immense value in warfare. What a chance to prove it! Three cheers for the Golden Eagle.” In his excitement Harry pulled his soft cap from his head and waved it enthusiastically.

Frank, however, seemed to view the situation more gravely than his light-hearted brother. As has been said, Frank, while but little older in point of years possessed a temperament diametrically opposed to the mercurial nature of his younger brother. He weighed things, and indeed in the construction of the Golden Eagle, while Harry had suggested all the brilliant imaginative points, it had been the solid practical Frank who had really figured out the abstruse details of the wonder-ship’s structure.

Despite this difference of temperament—in fact Harry often said, “If Frank wasn’t so clever and I wasn’t so optimistic we’d never have got anywhere,”—in spite of this contrast between the two there was a deep undercurrent of brotherly love and both possessed to the highest degree the manly courage and grit which had tided them over many a discouraging moment. Nor in the full tide of their success, when people turned on the street to point them out, were either of the boys at all above recognizing their old playfellows and schoolmates as has been known to be the case, it is said, with other successful boys—and men.

“I don’t know, Harry,” replied Frank at length to his brother’s enthusiastic reception of the news of the rebellion, “there are two sides to every question.”

“Yes, but Frank, think,” protested Harry, “we shall have a chance to see a real skirmish if only they