_He wrote it—laughingly, he said; grimly, we believe—nine months ago. This is how it happened:_
_In October Collins went to Buffalo to test a new Curtiss bomber-fighter for the navy. Before he left he took dinner with his old friend Archer Winsten, who conducts the In the Wake of the News column for the_ Post. _Winsten wrote a column about Collins and his spectacular job, begged the flyer to do a guest column for him on his return, telling of the Buffalo feat._
_What happened after that is best told in Collins’s own words._
_He wrote to his sister, out West: “I got to thinking it over and thought maybe I wouldn’t come back because it was a dangerous job, and then poor Archer would be out of a column.... So I playfully wrote one for him in case I did get bumped off. Thoughtful of me, don’t you think?... I never got bumped off. Too bad, too, because it would have been a scoop for Arch....”_
_Last Friday’s job was to have been Jimmy’s last as a test pilot. He took it because he needed the money, for his wife and children. Soon he was to have started on a writer’s career._
_Jimmy’s writing career ends today with his testament. He prefaced it with the following:_
_“The next words you read will be those of James H. Collins, and not ‘as told to,’ although you might say ghost-written.”_
Do you remember an old, old story? I shall tell you just the beginning of it: “In the beginning was the word, and the word was God....” That’s enough for you to see what I mean.
Not by the spoken word. I cannot say to you by the spoken word, “I am dead.”
But there is not only the spoken word. There is also the written word. It has different dimensions in space and time.
It is by the written word that I can say to you, “I am dead.”
But there is not only the spoken and the written word. There is also the formless, unbreathed word of mood and dream and passion. This is the word that must have been the spirit of God that brooded over the face of the deep in the beginning. It is the word of life and death.
It was the word of my life and my death. The dream word that breathed into my nostrils the breath of life and destroyed me too.
I had a dream. Always I had a dream. I cannot tell you what that dream was. I can only tell you that flying was one of its symbols. Even when I was very young that was true. Even as long as I can remember.
