Mexico Missouri message., 1918-03-28
THE HIGH ADVENTURE.

In the latter decades of the past
century your most obedient" got
her first glimpse into the possibility
of aerial navigation.
Somewhere in Tennyson's poetic
lines, she caught the vision of "Airy
navies graphing in a sea of blue"
Thereupon she seized it as the sub
ject of her graduating essay-about
all she has ever seriously studied
was contained in those quivering
fools-cap sheets, bound with white
ribbon, and held by slip of a girl
in muslin draped with elder-blos-
| SONS.
A long skip from that summer
scene where flowers bloomed in ease
to these war hung days, when our
college graduates are skimming the
air in search for favorable fields for
battle.
My Absalom-haired Uncle laughed
to scorn my sheets of girlish imag-
inings-especially the peroration
wherein 1 flew me over to the Con-
tinent of Europe to escape the bale
| full sea-sickness. 1 quoted to him
our blue-blooded Cousin of Argyle,
who long studied the flight of the
buzzard, convinced that man could
wear machine wings on that model;
but Uncle told me to take my chances
with the sea, though 1 must give
1.-The deep what I could not keep"
Judge, then, my joy, when, inher-
iting, through no desert of my own,
this duty find my imaginative
flight more than fulfilled in 1.-THE
High Adventure" of today.
Here is the fate of two American
youths, unskilled in all but litera-
ture, who obeyed the Call of the
Wild, to find themselves gladly ad-
mitted into the Escadrille America
ne, mastering aviation in France.
With the RIGHTEOUSNESS of a diary,
are the details given, from the ten
minutes scramble through the bath
into their clothes, through each days
requirements of the art aerial Their
first practice was safe indeed, their
airplanes firmly anchored to the
ground, While they learned gas
control, the various buttons to touch,
and uses, of their rudder and lever.
Laughable were their first expert
ments as youths roller skates and
quite as harmless. But pluck and
perseverance soon carried them up
through the seven grades or classes.
During their flights they came to
know their machines as a Kentuck-
ian does his horse-to sense him, to
feel him a part of oneself, to move
with the same will, and on the
one impulse. Their first free, un-
censored flight must have been such
as we saw last fall when a student
of aviation is ordered" to fly at a
given altitude, a given distance, with
such and such pauses to descend,
and to return in given limit of time.
Then the new world opened itself
to them; first the areas above the
clouds, beyond the winds, with a
ceiling of heavens pure blue, a
flowing of shifting clouds, loneli-
ness unbroken, companionship with
the sun! World-ties are forgotten.
Memories of boyhood's dreams float
back EXhilaration, freedom, mas
terry. The man has time and space
to be Shimself, to glory in the full
use of his faculties untrammeled by
custom or criticism. Such man
can never be an earth-worm again.
1.-THE actual flying experience
gives one sensitive ear for motors;
an accurate sense of flying speed
the feel of ones machine in the air"
The airman gets the sixth sense and
never worries again about the scant-
mess of his knowledge of the theory
of flight.
This discovery of the air-life is
likened to Columbus discovery of
our new world. The end is so glorious
that all previous misadventures are
forgotten. The aviators realize why
the Greeks called their gods "deri-
sive". all affairs of mere terra
firma seem puny to one who sails
so far above. Our voyageurs had
no mighty mishap. One got lost on
his first flight and the other made
wrong landing but men and ma
chimes got back finally unhurt. The
first as he went out of the cloudbank
(where he got LOST saw '"The earth
iauntily uptilted on one rim like
gigantic enlargement of Peter New
ellis Slant Book He expected to
see dogs and dishpans, baby carriage