“I’ve had a note about you from Moffett,” he volunteered. “So,” he added, “it’s the old story of old dogs and new tricks. Having now reached the ripe old age of thirty-nine,” he went on, “you’re dead but won’t lie down. If you ask me, it’s a lot of bunk.” “The Regulations,” I reminded him, “set twenty-eight as the maximum age limit for flight training.” The admiral reached for the top drawer of his antique desk. A warm breeze floated in from across the Gulf of Mexico. Beyond the signal tower, across the blue harbor, the white sands of Santa Rosa Island gleamed in the sunlight. Still farther out glittered the quiet waters of the Gulf. The commandant handed me a sheet of paper. I recognized it at once as a few lines of doggerel I had written one wintry December night while the old seaplane tender and kite-balloon ship _Wright_ had lain in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. We had been working all day on a miserably cold job of ballasting the _Old Hooker_ and had turned the duty over to the aviators as a part of their instruction. Then suddenly someone of them had discovered that none of them had qualified as yet for their 50 per cent increase for “flight pay” and that unless they corrected this fault immediately they would lose the allowance. They had all laid down their tools, both the lighter-than-air and the heavier-than-air pilots, and had rushed over to the Naval Air Station at Lakehurst to ride up and down ten times in a kite-balloon attached to a winch in a warm hangar, leaving the ballasting to the mercies of the ship’s company, the so-called “thicker-than-mud.” Now I read the verses. The lighter-than-air are jolly boys, Who float on wings of gas, Like helium or hydrogen And some hot air, alas! They float about in kite-balloons A blimp or even a zep. And draw their extra fifty per cent, With promptitude and pep. The heavier-than-air boys zoom about, And make a lot of fuss, In F-5-L’s and NC boats And other kinds of bus. It takes a sort of superman To learn the air’s queer feel— And draw that extra fifty per cent, With such consuming zeal. And then there is another crew, A silly sort of dud, It does the heavy dirty work, The poor old thicker-than-mud. If one of these guys rams a rock, Or on a reef gets wrecked, He never gets his pay increased; Most likely he’ll be checked. And so we sail the briny deep, Two live ones and a dud, The lighter-than-air, the heavier-than-air— And the poor old thicker-than-mud. I glanced up to find a smile on the commandant’s lips. “I found it in the desk here,” he said, “after I had taken over from Christy.” We had visited the _Wright_ in the summer of 1922 after ferrying some F-5-L’s down from Philadelphia and someone must have lifted the masterpiece from the bulletin board.