Page:Pictorial beauty on the screen.djvu/36

 an alert farmer hitches an amusing span of mules, one black and one gray, to the triplane and drags it out of the mud.

The third scene is strange indeed. It looks at first like a dazzling sea of foam—perhaps the ocean churned to fury by a storm—no, you may not believe it, but it is a sea of clouds. We are in an airplane of our own high in the sky, perhaps miles and miles, or maybe only three-quarters of a mile, above sea level. Just as we become fascinated by the nests of shadows among the cloud billows, a black object swings up from the whiteness, like a dolphin or a submarine from the sea. It is the hydro-airplane with our hero and his pilot; we recognize them because they are now sailing abreast of us only a few yards away. The hero stands up and is about to assume the pose of Washington crossing the Delaware, a difficult thing in such a strong wind when he is suddenly struck from behind by a villain who evidently had concealed himself in the body of the hydro-airplane before the flight was started. The villain is dressed like a soldier and seems to have a knapsack on his back.

Meanwhile, the sea of clouds flows by, dazzling white and without a rift through which one might look to see whether a city, an ocean, a forest, or a cornfield lies below.

Suddenly we look upward and discover the triplane, silhouetted sharply against the sky like the skeleton of some monster. It has five bodies and the five propellors, which three or four minutes ago were paralyzed in the cow pasture, now are revolving so rapidly that we cannot see them. It would be very interesting—but look! the villain and the hero are hav