charged you a dollar and a quarter a
portion for it, y'understand, they was a bunch of crooks--ain't
it?--whereas nowadays when them crooks get eleven portions out of the
same chicken and charge you a dollar and a half a portion for it,
y'understand, they're a bunch of patriots, understand me, which if the
coal-dealer and the retail grocer and butcher would short-weight you and
overcharge you the way some of them patriotic New York hotel proprietors
does, it would be hard to find many patriots in New York City outside of
Blackwells Island _oder_ the Tombs prison."

"And yet, Abe, if you would go to work and figure out the overhead on a
chicken which is used for eleven portions of chicken _a la_ King,"
Morris said, "you would find that the hotel-keeper gets his profit only
from the neck which he uses for chicken consomme."

"Well, say!" Abe exclaimed. "A profit of six cups of chicken consomme at
forty cents a cup ain't to be sneezed at, neither, and even then you are
taking the hotel-keeper's word for the overhead, which I don't care if a
feller would be ordinarily a regular George Washington, y'understand,
and wouldn't even lie to his wife about how he come out in his weekly
Saturday-night pinochle game, understand me, but when such a feller
reckons the overhead on the goods he manufactures it don't make no
difference if it would be locomotive engines or pants, in addition to
the legitimate cost of every one-twelfth dozen articles, he figures in
as overhead one-twelfth of his telephone number, one-twelfth of the
year he was born, one-twelfth of how old his grandfather _olav hasholom_
was when he married for the fourth time, and one-twelfth of every other
number he can remember, from his automobile number to his street number,
and usually such a crook lives in the last house from the city limits."

"I tell yer, Abe," Morris said, "the feller which invented poison gas
was some _Rosher_, and the feller which invented T.M.T. also, but the
feller which invented the overhead is in a class by himself just behind
the Kaiser. I don't know what his name is, but he is the feller what
fixed things so that a ten-cent loaf of bread has not only got into it
the air-holes which is caused by the yeast, but also the air-holes which
is caused by the lawyer's bill that the baking company paid at the time
they issued their five-million-dollar consolidated and refunding
four-per-cent. first-mortgage bonds, y'understand, and there's just as