“Why—er,” said Ethel, while I held my book up before my face discreetly.
“Why, they are to hop in the grass.”
“Oh,” said Minerva.
“Yes, they can hop many times the length of their own bodies.”
“Oh,” said Minerva.
Ethel made a mental calculation.
“I should say, Minerva,” said she, “that a grasshopper can hop about one hundred and twenty times his own length. How tall are you?”
“I’m five feet three,” was her unexpected answer.
“Well, call it five feet,” said Ethel, with a very serious face. “If you had the power of a grasshopper you could hop six hundred feet. That is to say, you could hop a long city block.”
The idea of Minerva hopping from Seventh Avenue to Eighth (for instance) was too much for me and I began to cough so hard that I had to go up stairs for a trochee.