“I wish—if only they could pick up a little speech—music—for us,” murmured Una, half her faint-heart in the wood, “if—if ever so dimly—faintly!”
“Speech—music—before six o’clock in the morning! You don’t ask much!” scoffed Pemrose. “I don’t suppose we’ll even get a twitter of telephony—the twitter of an early bird.” She laughed excitedly. “Listen—listen to that early bird, up there, in the tallest pine,” pushing the ear-phones up, “do you know what he’s saying—that brown thrasher? A brown thrasher it is! He’s chanting advice to the farmers:
“‘Shuck it, shuck it, sow it, sow it,
Plow it, plow it, hoe it, hoe it.’
“And he doesn’t know that he’s away behind the times with his old song!” Pemrose’s black brows were lifted archly. “That the air is just full of advice ‘stuff’ about him to which he’s deaf: ships, far out at sea, signaling reports about the weather, local Weather Bureaus sending in radio reports to headquarters—perhaps, we may come in on some of that! Oh! was there ever—ever, before, a time when it was so much better to be a girl than a bird?”
Fairly translated, now, in her excitement, that favored girl was selecting a nice, wet, oozing spot in the moss of the magic carpet into which to dig her heel—that fairy carpet more wonderful than ever was genii’s for transporting the one who stepped on it, thus, afar—so far as one sense was concerned, at least.
“Good ground connection!” she murmured. “That ought to bring results. Of course anything we do pick up will be awfully faint, just dot and dash, easier to glean—and in which two-thirds of the messages are sent out. Hus-sh!”
Deeper she ground her heel into the sparkling moss—Pemrose Lorry, radio amateur. She straightened her halo. She moved the bronze cat-whisker to touch the crystal and stood a statue as, the magic ring “rubbed”, those highly sensitive ear-phones became active—began to glean from the morning air.
“Do you ... are you—oh! are you—getting—anything?” Una watched her, hands clasped.
“Hush!” frowned the radio fan. “Your—your hor-rid racket!”