"Which way do you want it?" said I.
"It must be a steady breeze, straight down the turnpike," said he.
One reason why Phaeton chose this road was, that here he would encounter no telegraph wires. At the railway crossing, two men, riding on loads of hay, had come in contact with the wires and been seriously hurt. Another repetition of the accident might have been prevented by raising the wires on higher poles, but the company had chosen rather to run them down the pole on one side, under the street, and up the next pole.
"But I don't see how these kites are going to work," said Ned, "if you fly them side by side, and hitch the strings to those three hooks."
"Why not?"
"Because they'll interfere with each other, and get all tangled up."
"You would think so," said Phaeton, "if you haven't made a study of kite-flying, as I have. If you look at a dozen boys flying their kites at once on the common, you will see that, no matter how near together two or three boys stand, their kites will not go in exactly the same direction. Either the strings will slant away from each other a little, or else they will cross."
"How do you account for that?" said Ned.
"I suppose it's because you never can make two kites exactly alike; or, if they are exactly alike, they are not hung precisely the same; and so the wind bears a little more on the left side of one, and a little more on the right side of the other."
"I guess that's so," said Ned. "And yet it seems to me it would be better to fly them tandem."