GIRL (raising hand ). Teacher, why does an elephant have a trunk?
BOY (raising hand ). So’s’t he’d be an elephant, of course!
TEACHER. I will now hear the class in history. (They pass out to places, the boys trying to get a drink on the way.) The first scholar may tell me something about Christopher Columbus.
FIRST GIRL. Christopher was once a little boy like me—no, I mean he was a little girl like me—no, I don’t!—well, he went to school like me anyway. His mother’s name was Geneva.
BOY. Hoh! It wasn’t either. That was his father’s name.
ANOTHER GIRL. Teacher, wasn’t Geneva where he was born?
TEACHER. Yes, Mary, go on.
MARY. Somebody bought him a yacht or a steamer, I believe, and one Friday he sailed over here to America and asked us if we had been discovered yet, and we told him “No.” “All right,” he said, “you have.” So he took some of our Indians home with him to tell the king that they had been discovered, and we named the United States after him.
TEACHER. That is right in the main. One or two points I might take exceptions to. The next may take George Washington and tell us about him. (Is interrupted by a boy in seat who raises his hand and asks how many days there are in a year.) Who can tell Julius how many days in a year?
VENUS. Three hundred and sixty-five days and a fourth.