schedule made out before the tour began. The exception was at Portland, Maine (see text, page 7), which has been explained. Weather conditions were normal during the tour. We flew through fog, rain, snow and darkness as well as in clear weather.

The total mileage covered by the Spirit of St. Louis was 22,350 miles. The advance plane flew 20,350 miles. This difference was caused by Colonel Lindbergh flying half an hour more each day to allow the advance plane to arrive ahead.

The entire trip was made in 260 flying hours, or the equivalent of eleven days. The accompanying map (page 5) does not show where all of this mileage was obtained, for we seldom flew a straight course. On 192 occasions we zigzagged between stops to circle cities and drop messages. Other detours were for sightseeing.

One fact impressed on us during the three months was the great advantage of the airplane over other forms of transportation, especially in mountain country. Here the automobile and the railroad train must wind back and forth in order

to negotiate the grades, or deviate to find passes. The airplane simply climbs up and flies across in a straight line. It needs no bridge to cross a river; it needs no road to get by a thick forest.

All these things make the airplane a most natural means of transportation in mountainous and isolated parts of the country. It is, of course, a great timesaver everywhere, but it should be of special value in our larger, more sparsely settled States.

Some day air tourists will follow many of the invisible air trails along which Colonel Lindbergh passed in his nationwide tour. They will look down upon the garden spots of America from comfortable air transports in which they will travel with the same feeling of safety as in railroad trains.

To such travelers alone will come the fullest appreciation of this beautiful country of ours. Only from the air can one attain to a complete realization of the vastness of the continent, of its everchanging panorama, and of its thousands of beautiful scenes.

"M

Y PLAN," he explained, opening a map on the drop-table in our railway compartment, "is to do Yugoslavia's western frontier from the Alps to Albania. I'll take off among snow peaks, descend to the Adriatic, coast along Dalmatia, and end atop Montenegro's mountains."

We had become acquaintances on the eastbound Orient Express. He proved to be a retired United States consul, now traveling for pleasure, or, as he jokingly put it, on acquired momentum. He spoke innumerable tongues, including a dash of Romany, and his mind was a storehouse of knowledge, picked up in the big capitals and queer corners of the world.

How many traveling Americans really know the United States consul and his works? In real life, as distinct from "Madame Butterfly," he doesn't waste much time in adjusting naval officers' love affairs, and your little matter of a passport visa or of lost baggage is but a detail of his office day.

He is ever at his task of preparing economic reports which, percolating through business or journalistic channels, assist in interpreting some foreign country to the American people. To this end he has, at times, contributed veritable books, entailing years of patient research in preparation, to the archives of the American Consular Service.

WHERE AUSTRIA, ITALY, AND YUGO-
SLAVIA MEET

Such are some of his multifarious works, performed under the insignia of the Eagle and the Arrows, that emblem which greets many an American in many an outlandish spot, with its warming touch of home.

Having somewhat similar plans in mind, the ex-consul and I ended by adopting

each other, on the basis of his itinerary, as fellow travelers.

'We made the necessary rail connection in that magnificent Alpine territory where the borders of three states meet. Slowly our train wound through a wild gorge whose green, ribbonlike rivulets thrashed their way in and out of tempting trout pools en route to the Sava. Such is the Slovenian pass which thrusts itself wedgelike between Italy and Austria or, conversely, opens funnellike into Yugoslavia (see map, page 50).

Local humorists affirm that Italian and Austrian loggers, perched on the gorge's opposite crests, have been known to yell across Yugoslavia, "How's the grub in your camp?" But Paul Bunyan, mythical colossus among North American lumberjacks and past master in the gentle art of exaggeration, would probably have drawled his yarn thus: "I washed my shirt and hung it out across Yugoslavia to dry, so's the sleeves flopped down into Austria and the tail hung over into Italy."

The Slovenian valley, where nestles Yugoslavia's frontier village of Kranjska Gora, measures at that point, from one mountain boundary to the other, scarcely five miles. Yet what a five-mile stretch of Alpine sward, lying like some great turquoise cup whose sheer sides are crowned, as Roman wine cups were crowned, with snow!

Here tiny Kranjska Gora huddles under the drifted Razor whose great, sky-cutting blade rivals the Moslem's fabled scimitar bridge to Paradise.

One doesn't bother about names at Kranjska Gora. Either you sleep at "the inn" or else at "the other inn." And there are no street names, because nobody would know what to do with them. A house number is all the address that any one of the 750 villagers needs, and that of