after it, but were hopelessly out-distanced.  They discovered it on the outskirts of the city.  The airmen had already landed.  The reporter who was first in the race seized upon Lieutenant Smith, and learning that he had only alighted to obtain more petrol, rushed him back to the city in his car.  His comrades and competitors, on arriving, sought to interview the second man, whose name they had not been able to ascertain; but he was very uncommunicative, being occupied in cleaning the engine.  Lieutenant Smith was back with petrol in twenty minutes; in half-an-hour he was again on his way.  This extreme haste caused great disappointment to the airmen and civic dignitaries of the city, they having risen from their beds on hearing of his arrival to honour Lieutenant Smith with a reception.  When they reached the spot where he had descended, he had been gone some ten minutes.  In the race to meet him, one of the motor-cars collided with an electric-light standard and was overturned, its occupant, Mr. Aeneas T. Muckleridge, being carried to hospital in a critical condition.  Several San Francisco newspapers had published interviews with Lieutenant Smith, one of them ten columns long.

Mr. McMurtrie chuckled as he read this dispatch in the shorthand of the news agency.

“Bedad, ’tis worth a special editorial, Daniels.  But why didn’t we get it before, man?  It ought to have been in time for the morning papers.”

“You remember, sir, there’s been something wrong with the line to-day through the storm.”

“So there has, indeed.  Well, take out that stuff about the new British tariff, and send Davis in to me.”

He went into his room, sat back in his chair, pushed up his golfing cap, and smiled as he meditated the periods of his editorial.  In a few moments a thin, ragged-headed youth entered with an air of haste and terror.  He carried a paper-block, which he set on his knee, looking anxiously at the editor.  Mr. McMurtrie began to dictate, the stenographer’s pencil flying over the paper as he sought to overtake the rapid utterance of his chief.  The article, as it appeared on the second page of the Sphere an hour later, ran as follows: 

      HOCUS POCUS

A hoax, or as our merry ancestors would have called it, a flam, is usually the most ephemeral and evanescent of human devices.  Like a boy’s soap bubble, it glitters for a brief moment in iridescent rotundity, then ceases to be even a film of air.  It is unsubstantial as the tail of Halley’s comet.  On rare occasions, it is true, its existence is prolonged; many worthy people are beguiled; and some enthusiasts are so effectually hoodwinked as to persist in their delusion, and even to form societies for its propagation.  But mankind at large is sufficiently sane to avoid a fall into this abyss of the absurd, and, having paid its tribute of laughter, goes its way without being a cent the worse.

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