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.