al election
or the Hadj-American subscribers to the Victory Loan represented as much
as .000000001 per cent. of the total amount raised, the newspapers kept
it pretty quiet, Abe. So, therefore, Abe, leaving out of the question
altogether that a very big percentage of the highest grade citizens
which we've got in this country is Irish by ancestry and brains, Abe,
why shouldn't the Irish have their say before the Peace Conference?"

"For one thing," Abe said, "the delegates to the Peace Conference is
already pretty well acquainted with what them Irishmen would tell them,
unless them delegates is deaf, dumb, and blind."

"That's all right, Abe, but a good argument was never the worse for
being repeated," Morris concluded, "in especially when it comes from
people which has given us not only good arguments during the past four
years, but service, blood, and money. Am I right or wrong?"

XX

JULY THE FIRST AND AFTER

"It's already surprising what people will eat if they couldn't get
anything else," Abe Potash commented one morning in June.

"Not nearly so surprising as what they would drink in the same
circumstances," Morris Perlmutter remarked.

"Well, I don't know," Abe continued. "Here it stands in the newspapers
where a professor says that for the information of them men which would
sooner eat grasshoppers as starve, Mawruss, they taste very much like
shrimps if you know how shrimps taste, which I am thankful to say that I
don't, Mawruss, because I never yet had the nerve to eat shrimps on
account of them looking too much like grasshoppers."

"That's nothing," Morris declared. "In Porto Rico, where they have had
prohibition now for some time already, the authorities has just found
out that the people has been drinking so much hair tonic as
ersat-schnapps, Abe, that the insides of the stomach of a Porto-Rican
looks like the outside of the President of the new Polish Republic, if
you know what I mean."

"Well, if the prohibition law is going to be enforced so as to
confiscate the schnapps which is now being stored away by the people who
have had an insurance actuary figure out their expectancy of life at ten
drinks a day for 13.31416 years, Mawruss, or all the cellar will hold,
y'understand," Abe said, "it won't be much later than July 2d before
somebody discovers that there's quite a kick to furniture polish or
6-in-1, Mawruss, and in fact I expect to see after July 1st, 1919, that
there would be what lo