Speed

The sound of an airplone motor in the sky is no novelty to the citizens of Mineola, L. I. Planes from the airport began to drone aver the town in 1917; they have never stopped. Mumbling like bumblebees by day, complaining by night like mosquitoes brushed, for their plaguery, from the beard of their God, their noise has jarred through the brains of the townsmen, mingling its drowsiness with the reveries of sleepyheads until that jargoning has become part of the normal somnolence of the place, part of the indistinguishable murmur of the summer countryside, the wash of the salt air and the brooding rhythm of the distant sound.

Yet last week a voice tumbled out of the sky that made the clerk in the Mineola Courthouse lift his head from his elbow and open his eyes. He stared around him, and discovered that all the people had run into the square, where they stood, jabbering together and pointing up to heaven.

A small blue and gold airplane postured above them in a sunbeam. It climbed against a curtain of cloud, glided in minute undulations as if it ran on tiptoes, then pirouetted sharply with a flash of light like a little cry, while the sunbeam gravely lighted a ballet dancer. And always that strange sound accompanied the dance--a sound pleasant and terrifying, like the reverberation of an enormouse cello-string. But it was more, it was increditable, that sound. ... as if the god Pan were snoring

The plane moved so fast that it seemed foolish to suppose that the solemn and magnificent music bore any relation to its maneuvers. Suddenly it banked, began to plunge down. An officer on Mitchell Field watched it descend. This machine, a 1,400 horsepower Curtiss racer, with a wingspan of only 22 feet, had been sent up for its first official speed test. Its manufacturers believed that it could travel 255 miles an hour. In it Lieut. Alford J. Williams had on an ancient shirt, greased with the smuts of innumerable flights -- a good luck shirt. If he had good luck in it this time, he would fly that plane, or its duplicate, in the International Races at Baltimore next month.

A shadow flicked over the head of the officer on the field. He made the electric connection that set off a stopwatch. In 7.4 seconds the shadow crossed the other end of a kilometre course. Three times more Pitcher Williams took the course, then landed. He had reached a speed of 302.3 miles an hour. The record, because it was made from a gliding drop, is not allowed in the International Competition, but it stands as official in the U. S. No human being has ever before traveled as fast as Lieut. Williams.