"Alma, please," begged Tilly, in mock horror, raising both her hands, "please don't give us any more of those mean annual temperatures. I'm sure if they can be any meaner than the temperature right here to-day is," she sighed, as she fell to fanning herself vigorously, "I don't want to know what it is!"
"Tilly!" gasped Cordelia, in shocked disapproval. "What would Genevieve say!"
Tilly shrugged her shoulders.
"Say? She wouldn't say anything—she couldn't," declared Tilly, unexpectedly, "because she'd be laughing at us so for digging into Texas like this and unearthing all its poor little secrets!"
"But, Tilly, I think we ought to study it," reproved Cordelia, majestically, above the laugh that followed Tilly's speech. "Elsie—I mean, Miss Martin,—what did you find out to-day?"
Elsie wrinkled her nose in a laughing grimace at Tilly, then began to speak in an exaggeratedly solemn tone of voice.
"I find Texas is so large, and contains so great a variety of soil, and climate, that any product of the United States can be grown within its limits. It is a leader on cotton. Corn, wheat, rice, peanuts, sugar cane and potatoes are also grown, besides tobacco."
"And watermelons, Elsie," cut in Bertha Brown. "I found in a paper that just last year Texas grew 140,000,000 watermelons."
"I was coming to the watermelons," observed Elsie, with dignity.
"Wish I were—I dote on watermelons!" pouted Tilly in an audible aside that brought a chuckle of appreciation from Harold Day.