ad
contributed my services, and these few steps were sufficient to close
the deal. I was signed up on the spot. As they were leaving the
barracks one excited young person ran up and halted the arrogant
Thespians. "If I get the doctor to remove my Adam's Apple," he pleaded
wistfully, "do you think you could take me on as a pony?"

"No," said one of them, not without a certain show of kindness. "I
fear not. It would be necessary for him to remove the greater part of
your map and graft a couple of pounds on to your sadly unendowed
limbs."

From that day on my life has become one of unremitting toil. Together
with the rest of the Show Girls I vamp and slouch my way around the
clock with ever increasing seductiveness. We are really doing
splendidly. The ponies come leaping lightly across the floor waving
their freckled, muscular arms from side to side and looking very
unattractive indeed in their B.V.D.'s, high shoes and sock supporters.
"I can see it all," says the Director, in an enthusiastic voice, and
if he can I'll admit he has some robust quality of imagination that I
fail to possess.

Us Show Girls, of course, have to be a little more modest than the
ponies, so we retain our white trousers. These are rolled up, however,
in order to afford the mosquitoes, who are covering the show most
conscientiously, room to roost on. And sad to relate, the life is
beginning to affect the boys. Only yesterday I saw one of our toughest
ponies vamping up the aisle of Mess Hall No. 2 with his tray held over
his head in the manner of a Persian slave girl. The Jimmy-legs,
witnessing this strange sight, dropped his jaw and forgot to lift it
up again. "Sweet attar of roses," he muttered. "What ever has happened
to our poor, long-suffering navy?" At the door of the Mess Hall the
pony bowed low to the deck and withdrew with a coy backward flirt of
his foot.

I can't express in words the remarkable appearance made by some of our
seagoing chorus girls when they attempt to assume the light and airy
graces of the real article. Some of the men have so deeply entered
into their parts that they have attained absolute self-forgetfulness,
with the result that they leap and preen about in a manner quite
startling to the dispassionate spectator. My career so far has not
been a personal triumph. In the middle of a number, the other night,
the dancing master clapped his hands violently together, a signal he
uses when he wants all motion to cease.