“Now,” Miss Grimes told me at recess, shoving some records at me, “here are the first four pieces. Take them, one at a time, and play each one over and over again till you know it.” Then she went out of the room, closing the door behind her.
It was fun at first. But I got sick of it. The old pieces were no good. So I hunted up something snappy. A band piece with a lot of loud toots in it. And at the first toot, what do you know if the tin frog didn’t come to life! “R-r-r-a-t-s!” it rumbled in Scoop’s desk, sort of muffled-like. Then the record gave another loud toot and the frog sassed it back. Say, it was bully! There is some sense to that kind of music.
I took the frog out of the lunch box and put it on a chair in front of the talking machine. Mr. Ricks had told us that it was the sound waves [[35]]that tripped the machinery inside of the frog. I don’t understand about sound waves. But I saw right off that it was the loud toots that did the business. And I decided to do some experimenting.
Our talking machine has a cloth front where the music comes out. But one day Bid Stricker skidded and rammed his elbow through the cloth, breaking the bracketwork. And now I discovered that by making a slightly larger hole in the cloth I could squeeze the frog inside.
This worked fine. And I was having a high old time when the door opened and in came Miss Grimes. I thought I’d catch it. But she was complaining to another teacher about something and didn’t notice what I was up to. Then the bell rang and the kids all came in.
When school was called, Miss Grimes said to me:
“How many times did you play ‘The Maiden’s Prayer’?”
“Six times,” I guessed, wondering which one of the pieces was that.
“And are you sure that you will recognize it the next time that you hear it?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, getting fidgety. What worried me was the talking frog. It was still [[36]]shut up in the talking machine. I was afraid that something would happen.