The development of these waterplanes is an important step towards the huge and swarming popularisation of flying which is now certainly imminent.  We ancient survivors of those who believed in and wrote about flying before there was any flying used to make a great fuss about the dangers and difficulties of landing and getting up.  We wrote with vast gravity about “starting rails” and “landing stages,” and it is still true that landing an aeroplane, except upon a well-known and quite level expanse, is a risky and uncomfortable business.  But getting up and landing upon fairly smooth water is easier than getting into bed.  This alone is likely to determine the aeroplane routes along the line of the world’s coastlines and lake groups and waterways.  The airmen will go to and fro over water as the midges do.  Wherever there is a square mile of water the waterplanes will come and go like hornets at the mouth of their nest.  But there are much stronger reasons than this convenience for keeping over water.  Over water the air, it seems, lies in great level expanses; even when there are gales it moves in uniform masses like the swift, still rush of a deep river.  The airman, in Mr. Grahame-White’s phrase, can go to sleep on it.  But over the land, and for thousands of feet up into the sky, the air is more irregular than a torrent among rocks; it is—­if only we could see it—­a waving, whirling, eddying, flamboyant confusion.  A slight hill, a ploughed field, the streets of a town, create riotous, rolling, invisible streams and cataracts of air that catch the airman unawares, make him drop disconcertingly, try his nerves.  With a powerful enough engine he climbs at once again, but these sudden downfalls are the least pleasant and most dangerous experience in aviation.  They exact a tiring vigilance.

Over lake or sea, in sunshine, within sight of land, this is the perfect way of the flying tourist.  Gladly would I have set out for France this morning instead of returning to Eastbourne.  And then coasted round to Spain and into the Mediterranean.  And so by leisurely stages to India.  And the East Indies....

I find my study unattractive to-day.

OFF THE CHAIN

(December, 1910)

I was ill in bed, reading Samuel Warren’s “Ten Thousand a Year,” and noting how much the world can change in seventy years.

I had just got to the journey of Titmouse from London to Yorkshire in that ex-sheriff’s coach he bought in Long Acre—­where now the motor-cars are sold—­when there came a telegram to bid me note how a certain Mr. Holt was upon the ocean, coming back to England from a little excursion.  He had left London last Saturday week at midday; he hoped to be back by Thursday; and he had talked to the President in Washington, visited Philadelphia, and had a comparatively loitering afternoon in New York.  What had I to say about it?

Firstly, that I wish this article could be written by Samuel Warren.  And failing that, I wish that Charles Dickens, who wrote in his “American Notes” with such passionate disgust and hostility about the first Cunarder, retailing all the discomfort and misery of crossing the Atlantic by steamship, could have shared Mr. Holt’s experience.