You all know those jolly words from “ Alice's Adventures through the Looking Glass,” and in a measure we are about to push our way through the melting mirror of hearsay to the strange world of wonderful facts, where boats fly, and men think nothing of the sort of ascent that blew the breath out of the poor White King when he received his first dusting in the air. We will talk, you and I, of shoes for aircraft—ships that fly and sealing wax that guards the secrets that have made the British seaplane the greatest example of its kind in all the wide world.

First of all you would like to find out, I know, how aircraft manage to fly at all.

You can find that out easily. Take a large box lid or other flat surface, hold it up vertically before you and run across the room with it.

“ The time has come, ” the Walrus said,
“ To talk of many things ;
Of shoes and ships and sealing wax,
Of cabbages and kings. ”
Lewis Carroll