"Young people, I—"
"That's Bill—hello, Bill Medders—when did you———?"
And the startled company, staring about, saw Mr. Hooper stumbling forward in the aisle toward the trumpet.
"You win, me lads, you—"
Bill Brown could not help laughing at the impetuous honesty of his kind old friend. Pointing to the horn, and placing his hand like a shell behind his own ear, the amused boy signed to the excited old man to listen.
"The old geezer looks like 'His Master's Voice,' don't he?" came like a sneer from the background.
During the pandemonium, the voice in the trumpet was proceeding quite unperturbed.
"Silence!" shouted Bill, looking severely in the direction of the "seat of the scornful." "All please listen in on this. Mr. Meadowcroft is speaking." The confusion subsided and they heard these words:
"—sometimes impossible to get Mr. Edison's attention for weeks at a time. He has his meals brought in and sleeps in the laboratory—when he sleeps at all—and so intense is his interest in his work that it is useless to attempt to disturb him even for what seems to me to be business of the highest importance.
"But he has permitted me to express his deep and sincere interest in all you young people, and I am adding, on my own responsibility, three expressions of his which now seem to have maximum force because he has used them: