She says, "Dad has been telling me all about you, Mr. McRae, and I'm going to see to it that you really see the New York of Twenty-Five O Seven. He wants to drag you to a lot of stuffy old lectures and scientific conventions, and exhibits you like a freak, but I'm taking charge today."
I remark that that will be fine.
Well, we start right out, and it is amazing what has been done in my absence. Ann—that is the little number's name—tells me about the change in one thing and another; they are now taking vacations on Venus and Mars, and it is merely a matter of a couple of hours to get to San Francisco or London. Of course this is all very interesting, but I am interested in what they are doing in the musical line. I tell Ann this.
"We are in luck," she says, "for there is a concert tonight up in Albany and you will be able to hear all the finest music there."
"I do not wish to hear the long hairs play," I tell her. "Let us go down along Fifty-Second Street and listen to a little barrelhouse. That is my racket."
"There is no musical organization on Fifty-Second Street," Ann says. "We do all our listening and looking at concerts like this one in Albany, and it is the only sort of music we have."
By this time we are home, so I ask Ann if she would like to hear how we played it back in the Twentieth Century. She replies that she would, but not to let her father, the doc, know about it because he is something of a bug on the modern music and considers the old style quite degenerate.
I laugh at this. "What he means by the old style is probably something I have never heard," I say. "You must remember that I am almost six hundred years old, so my style is practically antique. Why, your father did not even know that my horn was a musical instrument until I told him my story, and it is indeed a shame that there are not a few old Beiderbecke platters around so you all could hear what you've been missing."
Well, I have not played the old slush pump since I escaped from the fourth dimension, so I am careful when I pick it up, but after I have tried a few runs I say I am all set. Ann is very curious, and she makes me tell her how it works, as it seems they use instruments altogether different in these concerts we are going to. I explain how the wind goes around and all, and then I move into I'm Getting Sentimental Over You. I am very mellow, and T. Dorsey couldn't have sounded any better in the little concert I give. Ann is very overcome.
"It is beautiful," she says when I have finished. "Are there words to it?"