Little Dick Winters and Rose and even the older crippled boys were a trifle awed by the dignity of the occasion and the strangeness of their surroundings, but beneath the boys' merry joking and the doctor's friendly manner they soon got rid of this feeling and prepared to enjoy themselves to the limit.
Mr. Joel Banks was intensely interested in the radio apparatus, asking intelligent questions, to which the boys eagerly replied. So interested were they in the mechanical end that Dr. Dale finally informed them that if they expected to listen in at any concert that afternoon they had better get to it without further delay.
Aunty Bixby, listening anxiously through her ear trumpet, nodded emphatically at this suggestion.
"Yes," she said in her high, chronically irritable voice, "let's get along with it. I want to see what that horn-shaped contraption can do. Looks to me like nothin' so much's an old fashioned phonygraph."
"It's far more wonderful than any phonograph," the doctor told her good-naturedly. Then turning to Bob, directed: "Let her go, Bob. It's just time to catch that concert in Pittsburgh."
Bob obeyed, and then the fun began. For an hour that seemed only a minute in length all listened to a concert of exquisite music both vocal and instrumental, a concert given by some of the world's great artists and plucked from the air for their benefit.
Once Aunty Bixby dropped her trumpet and was heard to murmur something like "drat the thing!" But Jimmy gruntingly got down on his knees and retrieved the instrument from its hiding place under a chair. Then, finding she had missed part of a violin selection, the old woman exclaimed irritably.
"There, I missed that. Have them play it over again!"
The boys looked at each other, then looked suddenly away, trying their best to control the corners of their mouths.
However, when the concert was over and the last soprano solo, flowing so truly through the horn-shaped amplifier, died away into silence they saw that Aunty Bixby's bright old eyes were wet.