reply, endeavouring to turn the conversation into another channel, for I did not care to discuss my narrow escape from death over the mishap which was certainly my own fault.
I was standing with Teddy in one of the long worksheds of the Barwick Aeroplane Factory at Hendon on that bright morning early in October, 1915. The wind was light, the barometer high, and both of us had been up, as we had been testing our monoplanes.
As he stood leaning against a half-finished machine idly smoking a 'gasper'—a cigarette in the airman jargon—he presented a fine picture of the clean-limbed young Englishman in his wind-proof aviation suit, with leather cap and ear-pieces, while his goggles had been pushed upon his brow.
Both of us, 'as quirks,' had learned to fly at the same school at Brooklands before the outbreak of war, and both of us were enthusiastic airmen.
In introducing myself to the reader of this chronicle of fact I suppose I ought—at the risk of using the first person singular a little too much—to explain that I, Claude Munro, aged twenty-five, am son of Sir Reginald Munro, a man well known as a physician, a prominent prescriber of pills and powders in Wimpole Street.
On coming down from Cambridge I had read for the bar a short time, but finding that my inclination was more in the direction of electricity and mechanics, my indulgent father allowed me to take a course of study at a Wireless School, where I was not long in learning most of the recent discoveries in the field of radiotelegraphy.
One Saturday afternoon, about two years before,
