England. The time was midnight or thereabouts. The day was Thursday. The year was 792 A.D. Nothing in the mind of Father Wulstan, at this time, considered the year 1947, because it had not yet come.

There were three other priests with me, all older than I. They were very old. I was thirty. I was devout, God loving, almost a religious fanatic. But I loved mankind, too, wished to do for him all that the Master had intended. I was the keeper of the faith, the doer of works. The others were Fathers Dennis, Paul and Elihu.

In both my hands I held an intricate model of dried clay. It was a model of something I had seen many times in dreams. It was a conveyance, a conveyance like none known hitherto in the history of the world, in any history I had ever read or heard of. It certainly was not mentioned in Holy Writ, unless that certain passage in the Revelation of Saint John the Divine were this—wherein he spoke of "flying things out of The Pit."

This conveyance, I realized, complete in every detail save the power by which it might travel, was intended to travel in the air, at any height, like a bird—like the fastest bird known to nature. I had shaped this thing with my loving hands. Its details had come to me in a series of dreams. It had wings of an especially beautiful design. I had burnished the gray of the clay so that it shone, for I had visioned the sun gleaming on those wings.

I had seen this "metal bird" in dreams.

Below the wings was the body of my artificial "bird," and under that body were two wheels. The wheels flared slightly outward, and were joined to the body by straight staves—and herein was I thrice puzzled. In my dream the outer rims of the wheels had been soft, pliable, so that on the ground the "bird" traveled without bouncing. I knew that the staves were of metal, but while I had seen it often in dreams, I had never seen its name.

I felt sure that man had not yet found the metal needed for the wings of my "metal bird." There was something else about it: there were three vents, carefully spaced, under each of the two wings. What traveled through those vents I did not know. I had a "metal bird" which I knew would fly, because I had constructed it again, several times, in wood and paper. Alone in the woods about Saint Dennis, I had flung the model into the air, and it had flown. I had then destroyed my models of wood and paste and paper. I did not know why.

But one thing I did know: if my metal bird did not 

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