Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/81

Rh maintained the polite fiction that the songs had something to do with the book, and cued each musical number. In order to do this it was necessary now and then for the tenor to be reminded by a catchup bottle in a Vienna rathskeller of Apple Blossom Time in Delaware. Or the story at the moment having been left stranded on the island of Sulu and the authors having a song about Doctor Cook, gumdrops and Eskimos on their hands, the dialogue would run something like this:

She: Isn't it warm here in Sulu?

He: It is indeed. I wish I were back again in dear old Franz Josef Land.

The conductor, who had been waiting with poised baton, would give it a flourish and the pack would be off in full cry on the gumdrop song.

When the padded-shouldered young Harvard football hero and Policeman O'Rourke's daughter, Kathleen, the heroine, popped up in Sherwood Forest from Bar Harbor, I always used to enjoy seeing Kathleen register surprise at finding a grand piano in the heart of the forest.

"Who could have left this piano here?" she would exclaim.

"How fortunate!" would be