The Birmingham age-herald., 1910-11-24
HOW TT FEELS TO FLY

James Hopper, who rode as a passen- ger in an Antionette aeroplane, answers this oft-repeated question in the Christ mas Everybodys. Describing the way in which they left the ground he says:
 And then-good Lord, what is that! At first I thought that we had struck an abandoned quarry and were hurtling through a pile of stones. Then, more plausibly, that. we had passed from the grassy plain to road of torn-up macadam. But neither of these supposi- tions answered quite the question put to me by my senses. We seemed to roll on a medium singularly hard. Hard and smooth, and yet sown with roughness. It felt as if we were upon a road of ada mant laid upon the bedrock of the earth, and as if upon this adamantine road pebbles hard and faceted like diamonds had been strewn. Upon the hard, smooth subsurface the machine glided level, but excited to furious trepidation by the bristling diamonds. We are going through ck-pile, I said to myself, returning to my first unsatisfactory and yet more plausible supposition. We were flying, by love! That was the meaning of this hard going, this tremendous tre- pidation. From the gentle earth we had passed the ways of the air. That ada mantine, resilient, and diamond-bristling surface upon which we rode now, 1t was the azure of the skies! It was ozone, 1t was ether, 1t was everything that Is hay and impalpable and blue-and it felt like metal, like rock, like chrome-steel, like the compressed bowels of some planet smashed between two suns. was flying, and 1t was like drilling. I was fleeing the earth, and the earth was following me, jealous and vigilant, gripping me, stubbornly and implacably, with its earth-sensations.
 From the first, I had lost my sense of direction and of the cardinal points. and seemed hurting aimlessly through a vast nowhere. A most distressing, dis gusting sensation. I felt like that man who had lost/ his shadow. Worse than that shadowless person, I felt as if, springing upward in the ether, I had left my entire personality pasted back there upon the earth.
 And of the landscape I could bring back nothing clear. It was always a whirling blur of a landscape; a landscape painted by an artist using too fulid col- ors; landscape photographed out of focus. The trees ran together; they merged with the land. The land stopped into the sky, and the sky into the land Roads writhed vivid an instant like snakes, and then sank back into the plain. It was the shifting, dissolving liquid landscape of an uncertain dream
 .The sun was setting. Each time as we faced it now, we coursed giganticaly toward it, homing dragon making for fabulous cavern aflame with gold Ruler at length took the beast high over the center of the plain and cut off the power
 "Then I flew; for the first time l flew. For the first time I felt that I was flying, and it was because I was falling. The trepidation beneath me had stopped: the wind had ceased; the hide ous tumult slipped off into a breathless silence It was as if from the sweat and oil and tumult of toll we had suddenly passed into the purity and hush of the high stellar spaces. We seemed to hover there a moment, motionless. Then a long, slender and dipping ecstasy-and we were upon earth, by the sheds"