With a company endowed with mediocre ability Hayes did wonders. He decided to have a beauty chorus, and with curses and entreaties he beat sixteen ungainly males into a semblance of the charm and delicacy of an Empire revue. It suffered a great deal, that chorus; it was cursed, and excommunicated. It was made a target for all the unmentionable swears. If it had been composed of girls, it would have spent half its time in tears. But eventually it emerged, in all its nudity, a machine. There was a big joyboard, running well into the auditorium; and on this it affected all the airs and graces of the courtesan. It cajoled and pleaded; it undulated with emotion. It swayed to each breath of melody, and it was not too unpleasant a sight, for Hayes had wisely transported it to an Eastern [Illustration: OUR LEADING LADY. [_To face page 214._ ] island, to a harem, and the kindly veils of Ethiopian modesty. Through a mist of white calico it was impossible to discern the razored roughness of a cheek, and the unrazored blackness of an upper lip. The chorus was a triumph. And the same tribute must be accorded to the leading ladies. Nature had provided them with pleasing features. Under Hayes’s tuition they learnt the art of the glad eye and the droop of the lower lip. To see those beauties was to be back again in the gay world of colour and revue. A breath of femininity quivered about the rough-cast masculinity of Mainz. So much so, indeed, that on the night of the first performance a distinguished field officer, who had drunk deeply not only of romance, was observed chasing round the corridor behind the flying feet of an inclement Venus, and murmuring between his gasps, “Don’t call me Major, call me Jim”; and even the most hardened misogynists were not unconscious of a thrill when “Leola,” the daughter of the Hesperides, tripped down the joyboard, and sang with outspread, enticing arms, that beckoned to the audience-- “Come to Sonalia with me.” The plot of the play was extravagantly simple. The curtain went up, revealing a harassed author searching among his papers for a hidden plot. The show was billed to start at two o’clock, but the play was lost, what should he do? And then the machinery of Romance began. An Arabic inscription gave the key. “Why should they not wish for the plot?” Faith would remove mountains, and Faith caused to emerge from the back of the stage a green-faced being, who called himself “The King of Wishland.”