A small airplane is ideal for short flights, joyriding the heavens, or sight-seeing among the clouds; but there is something more majestic and stable about a big machine like the Sky-Bird II which a pilot soon begins to love with a passion he never feels toward the little 'plane. An exquisite community of spirit grows up between machine and pilot; each, as it were, merges into the vitals of the other.  The levers and controls are the nervous system of the airplane, through which the will of the aviator may be expressed--expressed in an infinitely fine degree.  Indeed, a flying-machine is something entirely apart from and above all other contrivances of man's ingenuity.  It is the nearest thing to animate life which man has created.  In the air an airplane ceases to be a mere piece of dumb mechanism; it seems to throb with feeling, and is capable not only of primary guidance and control, but actually of expressing a pilot's temperament.