oks like stove polish, shoe polish,
automobile-body polish, and silver polish retailing at from one dollar
to a dollar and a half per hip-pocket-size bottle, which after being
strained through blotting-paper, y'understand, would net the purchaser
three drinks of the worst whisky that ever got sold on Chatham Square
for five cents a glass."

"And I suppose that pretty soon they will be passing a law forbidding
the manufacture of stove polish and directing that the labels on the
bottles shall contain the statement:

"Stove Polish by Volume 2, Seventy-five per cent. And in a thimbleful of
what ain't stove polish in that stove polish, Abe, there wouldn't be no
more harm than two or three quarts of so much nitroglycerin,
y'understand," Morris said. "Also on Saturday nights you will see the
poor women _nebich_ hanging around the swinging doors of paint and color
stores right up to closing-time to see is their husbands inside, while
the single men will stagger from house-furnishing store to
house-furnishing store--or the Poor Men's Clubs, as they call them
places where stove and silver polish is sold."

"But joking to one side, Mawruss, you don't suppose that the Polaks and
the Huns and all them foreigners is going to leave off drinking schnapps
just because of a little thing like a prohibition amendment to the
Constitution of the United States, do you?" Abe said.

"Why do you limit yourself to Polaks and Huns, Abe?" Morris asked.
"Believe me, there is fellers whose forefathers was old established
American citizens before Henry Clay started his cigar business,
y'understand, and when them boys gets a craving for schnapps after July
1st, they would _oser_ go to the nearest Carnegie Library and read over
the Prohibition Amendment to the Constitution till that gnawing feeling
at the pit of the stomach had passed away, understand me. At least, Abe,
that is what I think is going to happen, and from the number of people
which is giving out prophecies to the newspapers about what is going to
happen, and from the way they differ from each other as to what is going
to happen--not only about prohibition, but about conditions in Europe,
the Next War, the Kaiser's future, and the next presidential campaign,
y'understand, it seems to me that anybody could prophesy anything about
_everything_ and get away with it."

"They could anyhow get away with it till it does happen," Abe commented.

"Sure I know, but generally it don't happen," M