“It sure was,” replied Bob enthusiastically. “Every word of it was worth remembering. He certainly knows how to put things.”
“I suppose you read it in the newspaper the next day,” said Mr. Preston, glancing at him.
“Better than that,” responded Bob, with a smile. “We all heard it over the radio while he was making it.”
“Indeed!” replied the principal. “Then you boys heard it even before I did.”
“What do you mean?” asked Joe, in some bewilderment. “I understood that you were in the crowd that listened to him.”
“So I was,” Mr. Preston answered, in evident enjoyment of their mystification. “I sat right before him while he was speaking, not more than a hundred feet away, saw the motion of his lips as the words fell from them and noted the changing expression of his features. And yet I say again that you boys heard him before I did.”
“I don’t quite see,” said Herb, in great perplexity. “You were only a hundred feet away and we were hundreds of miles away.”
“And if you had been thousands of miles away, what I said would still be true,” affirmed Mr. Preston. “No doubt there were farmers out on the Western plains who heard him before I did.
“You see it’s like this,” the schoolmaster went on to explain. “Sound travels through the air to a distance of a little over a hundred feet in the tenth part of a second. But in that same tenth of a second that it took the President’s voice to reach me in the open air radio could have carried it eighteen thousand six hundred miles.”
“Whew!” exclaimed Jimmy. “Eighteen thousand six hundred miles! Not feet, fellows, but miles!”