Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 53.djvu/74

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62
POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.

The flat kites of the Malay or Eddy type are not less pleasing than their tailed cousins, the common kites of various shapes, and are more like living creatures, because of their incessant action. The mounting up of one after another with irregular movement, now turning to right or to left or downward, then catching an upward-going zephyr and soaring with it at an angle of seventy or

Comparative Altitudes.

eighty degrees far up after its happy mates, will be watched by the leisureful looker-on with absorbing interest.

Behold them, at length, poised high in air; the position of the far-away leader discoverable only by following with the eye the faint spider thread of drooping line. Ceasing from progress and retrogression, poised like humming birds before a flower, tipping momentarily now one side and then the other in rhythmic movement.