Henry Ward Beecher.
A BOY was lying on his back in a clover-sweet pasture, looking up dreamily at the white clouds that were drifting about on the calm blue sea of the sky. The field sloped down to the beach, and the salt breath of the ocean came to him on the passing breeze. All at once his eye was caught by something that made him start up suddenly, all alert attention. It was a sea-gull rising into the air, its wings flashing white in the bright sunshine.
“How does he do it?” he said aloud. “How is it that he can float about like that without any effort? It is just when he begins to mount into the air that he flaps his wings; now he is hardly moving them at all. He seems to be held up by the air just as a kite is!”
This was not the first time that young Samuel Langley had watched the flight of the sea-gulls. And the sight of a hawk circling above the tree-tops could always set him a-staring.
“There must be something about the air that makes it easy,” he pondered. “The birds know the secret, but I can’t even guess it!”
That night at dinner the boy was more than usually thoughtful.
“Father,” he said after a long silence, “don’t you think it might be possible for people to make some sort of an airship thing to sail through the air, without any gas bag to carry it up?”
“Have you heard that there is such a thing as the law of gravity, son?” quizzed the father, banteringly. “What goes up must come down, you know.”
“But, Father,” the boy persisted, “the hawks and gulls are much heavier than the air. There is nothing of the balloon sort about them.”