单选题 .  On 27 January I was due at the Albert Hall, London, where Sir Adrian Boult was to conduct a programme including the Elgar and the Mendelssohn Violin Concert. Diana and I left New York on the evening of the twenty-fifth, with ample time, as we presumed, to keep our appointment. With everyone secure in his safety belt, the plane shot down the runway, then halted with a tremendous screeching of brakes just short of takeoff. This was twice repeated before the shaken passengers were unloaded and told to return to the airport in the morning.
    Next day we set off for England again. To begin with, so thick was New York traffic that we almost missed the plane, which might have saved everyone a great deal of trouble. Disaster avoided, we took off at eleven-thirty, and shortly afterwards the pilot made his rounds. Wanting to reassure Diana, I stopped him and suggested that the untoward incidents of the day before hadn't been too serious. In that wonderful calm bluff English way, he answered, 'Airplane engines, you see, are made up of thousands of individual parts, and it is quite impossible to tell when any one of them may cease to function'. A short while later one of those many parts did indeed cease to function: oil began blowing over the wings, and back we went to Idlewild Airport, as it then was. At the third try, later that afternoon, we succeeded in crossing the Atlantic, making one stop to refuel in Newfoundland and another at Shannon in the Irish Republic, for one flew from landfall to landfall in those days.
    Here the English weather blocked further progress; fog had closed London Airport. It was about 6:30 a. m.  local time when we arrived at Shannon, too early to despair of reaching our destination. We telephoned my agent, Harold Holt, and I borrowed an airport office to practise in. However, as the hours passed and the London fog failed to lift, I grew anxious enough to try to charter from Aer Lingus a plane small enough to land in conditions which our big Stratocruiser could not cope with. For some reason Aer Lingus was not allowed to rescue us, so after more endless hours, we took off in the transatlantic plane, first at three forty-five—when the radio was found to be out of order and we had to turn back, then, finally, at four fifteen. All hopes of rehearsing had long been abandoned, but the concert itself still seemed safe. The fog had yet a couple of tricks up its sleeve, however. After circling over Heathrow a few times in a vain attempt to find a break in the blanket below him, the pilot landed at Manston on the east coast. Diana and I were delivered to the earth through the luggage shaft in the plane's belly, hustled through customs at a trot and thrust into a waiting car, which roared off the airfield with most gratifying drama. One mile farther on, the gentle fog of the countryside rolled toward us in thick, soft, totally opaque clouds, and we crawled the rest of the way at hardly more than walking speed, Diana shivering in the unheated car.
    We were of course late.26.  After the first attempts to take off, the author and his wife were asked to come back to the airport on ______.