"Sometimes when you get your set tuned wrong you hear some of the code. But the telegraph wave-length is much, much longer than the phone lengths. Guess you'd have a job listening in for anything Darry and Burd Alling would send from that old yacht."
"We can learn the Morse alphabet, just the same, can't we?" demanded her chum.
"Now, there you go again!" complained Amy. "Always suggesting something that is work. I don't want to have to learn a single thing until we go back to school in the fall. Believe me!"
Her emphasis only made Jessie laugh. She adjusted the crystal detector, or cat's whisker, as the girls called it, and then began to tune the coil until, with the tabs at her ears, she could hear a voice rising out of the void, nearer and nearer, until it seemed speaking directly in her ear:
"With which announcement we begin our evening's entertainment from the Stratfordtown Station. The first number on the program being——"
"Do you hear that? It is Mr. Blair himself," whispered Amy eagerly. "And he says——"
Jessie held up her hand for silence as the superintendent of the broadcasting station at Stratfordtown went on to announce, "Miss Bertha Blair, who will sing 'Will o' the Wisp,' Mr. Angler being at the piano. I thank you."
The piano prelude came to the ears of the Roselawn girls almost instantly. Jessie and Amy smiled at each other. They were proud to think that they had something to do with Bertha's becoming a favorite on the Stratfordtown programs, and likewise that their interest in the girl first served to call the superintendent's attention to her. In "The Roselawn Girls on the Program" is told of Bertha's first meeting with her uncle who had never before seen her.
They listened to the hour's program and then tuned the receiver to get what was being broadcasted from a city station—a talk on economics that interested to a degree even the two high-school girls. For frivolous as Amy usually appeared to be, she was a good scholar and, like Jessie, stood well in her classes.