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The chauffeur looked, too, as if he heard the Big Trump.

Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was; a long, thin tail feather of brightest flame streaming out from it to the little leaden fish, two-pound fish, that held its radio antenna steady in the air, kept it away from the controls—flipper and rudder controls!

Drifting down, a fire-tail, the aëroplane truly was.

Those controls were useless now. The burning plane was side-slipping from five hundred feet aloft—in spite of the efforts of the one aviator to right it before it landed.

It was but for a moment—an eternal moment—that the man and the kneeling girl watched it, before it roosted, bird of thunder, in a tree top, a noble white ash, over fifty feet tall, growing upon this side of the garden wall.

The startled tree seemed rolling up the whites of its eyes in terror—rustling the pale undersides of its crown of leaves—as the burning plane landed and stuck upon a topmost branch; and, a second earlier, the aviator, finding that he could not make a better landing before the gasolene tank blew up, jumped.