much nourishment in that kind of air-hole for a truck-driver's family of
growing children as there is in any other kind of air-hole."

"Well, the bakers 'ain't got nothing on the farmers when it comes to
cost bookkeeping, Mawruss," Abe said. "I was reading where the
milk-raisers' _Verein_ claims the price of feed is so high that they've
got to sell milk at ten cents a quart wholesale, but for all them
farmers figure that the same feed goes to fatten the cow for the market,
Mawruss, you might suppose that there was a big institution somewheres
up state called the Ezra B. Cornell Home for Aged and Indignant Cows,
y'understand, and that so soon as a cow gets through giving milk,
y'understand, instead of slaughtering it the farmer takes it to the home
in his automobile and contributes five dollars a week toward its support
until it dies of hardening of the arteries at the age of eighty-two."

"Take it from me, Abe," Morris said, "them farmers ain't such farmers as
people think they are. It's going to be so, pretty soon, that people
will be paying two dollars and a half for an orchestra seat and pretty
near break their hearts while the poor old second-mortgage shark is
being turned out of his little home by the farmer."

"And on the opening night, Mawruss, the front rows will be filled with
milk agents," Abe said, "and after the show you will see them sitting
around Rector's and Churchill's and getting terrible noisy over a magnum
of Sheffield Farms nineteen sixteen."

"Of course nobody is going to be the worser for making a joke about such
things, Abe," Morris interrupted, "but last winter when these fellers
which gets off mommerlogs in vaudeville shows was talking about somebody
being immensely wealthy on account his breath smelt from onions,
y'understand, there wasn't many people raising a family on less than
twenty-five dollars a week whose breath smelt from onions at that."

"Did I say they did?" Abe asked.

"And it is the same way with potatoes and fruit, not to say fish and
poultry and all the other foods which Mr. Hoover says we should eat in
order to save beef, sugar, and flour for the soldiers," Morris
continued. "When a woman buys nowadays flounder at twenty-five cents a
pound, she is paying ten cents for fish and fifteen cents toward the
fish-dealer's wife's diamonds or his six-cylinder automobile, so if I
would be Mr. Hoover, before I issued bread and meat cards to the
consumer I would hand out automobile