The best way of starting a second kite, after the first is well up, is to pay out about a hundred feet of cord for the tandem line, attaching one end of this to the main cord and the other to the second kite, which is left lying on the ground back downward.  Then pay out the main line evenly until the tandem line begins to lift.  As the pendent kite is borne higher and higher, it will swing for a while in a horizontal position; but will presently begin to flutter and sail sideways, and then finally come up more and more, until the wind catches it and it shoots up like a bird into its proper position.  In fact, once the first kite is securely up, the others will fly themselves by merely being attached to the main line as described.  Of course each fresh kite increases the pull on the main line, and the line must be made proportionately stronger as the tandem is increased.

RUNAWAY TANDEMS.

Mr. Eddy has had some remarkable experiences with escaping kites.  One day at Bayonne, in July, 1894, while he was flying a tandem of eight kites in a northwest wind blowing eighteen miles an hour, the main line broke with a loud snap, and the kites sailed away towards Staten Island with the speed of an escaped balloon.  One can scarcely conceive the rapidity with which a line of kites like this travels over the first four or five hundred feet after its release.  An ice-boat goes no faster, and one might as well pursue the shadow of a flying cloud as chase that string.  At the time of the escape the top kite, a four-footer, was up nearly a mile, and the other seven were flying at a good elevation.  The consequence was that although, as invariably happens in such cases, they began to drop, the lowest kite did not strike the ground until it had been carried about a quarter of a mile, to the New Jersey shore of the Kill von Kull, which is half a mile wide at this point.  Here kite number eight, a six-footer, caught in a tree and held the line for a few seconds until its own cord broke, under the strain, and set the other kites free.  This check had lifted the other kites, and they now flew right bravely across the water, not one of the seven wetting its heels before the farther shore was reached.  Then the lowest of them came to the ground, in its turn putting a brief check on the others.  But its cord soon broke under the strain, and the six still flying went sailing over the trees of Staten Island, hundreds of people watching them as they flew—­six tailless kites driving along towards New York Bay, the main line trailing behind over lawns and house-tops.

Then a queer thing happened.  As the loose end of the main line trailed along, it whipped against a line of telegraph wires with such violence as to wind itself around the wires again and again, just as a whip-lash winds round a hitching-post when whipped against one.  The result was that the runaway kites were finally anchored by the main line, and held fast until their owner, coming in quick pursuit on ferryboat and train, could secure them.