...
It is curious how many of these modern financiers of chance and bluff
have ended their careers by building. It was not merely my uncle. Sooner
or later they all seem to bring their luck to the test of realisation,
try to make their fluid opulence coagulate out as bricks and mortar,
bring moonshine into relations with a weekly wages-sheet. Then the whole
fabric of confidence and imagination totters--and down they come....
When I think of that despoiled hillside, that colossal litter of bricks
and mortar, and crude roads and paths, the scaffolding and sheds, the
general quality of unforeseeing outrage upon the peace of nature, I
am reminded of a chat I had with the vicar one bleak day after he had
witnessed a glide. He talked to me of aeronautics as I stood in jersey
and shorts beside my machine, fresh from alighting, and his cadaverous
face failed to conceal a peculiar desolation that possessed him.
"Almost you convince me," he said, coming up to me, "against my will....
A marvellous invention! But it will take you a long time, sir, before
you can emulate that perfect mechanism--the wing of a bird.
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