one."

"That's right!" Abe said. "Make jokes, why don't you? You are worser as
this here feller Zero."

"What feller Zero?" Morris demanded.

"Zero the emperor what fiddled when Rome was burning," Abe replied.
"He's got nothing on you. _You_ would fiddle if Rome, Watertown, and
Ogdensburg was burning."

"I don't know what you are talking about at all," Morris said. "And,
besides, the feller's name was Nero, not Zero."

"That's what you say," Abe commented, "which you also said that the
operators was only bluffing and that they wouldn't strike on us in a
thousand years, and considering that you said this only yesterday,
Mawruss, it's already wonderful how time flies."

"Well," Morris said, "how could I figure that them lunatics is going to
pick out the time when we've got practically no work for them and was
going to fire them, anyway, to call a strike on us?"

"You should _ought_ to have figured that way," Abe declared. "Didn't the
Kaiser abdicate just before them Germans got ready to kick him out?"

"The king business ain't the garment business," Morris observed.

"I know it ain't," Abe agreed. "Kings has got their worries, too, but
when it comes to laying awake nights trying to figure out whether them
designers somewheres in France is going to turn out long, full skirts or
short, narrow skirts for the fall and winter of nineteen-nineteen and
nineteen-twenty, Mawruss, I bet yer the entire collection of kings,
active or retired, doesn't got to take two grains of trional between
them."

"If everybody worried like _you_ do, Abe," Morris said, "the government
would got to issue sleeping-powder cards like sugar cards and limit the
consumption of sleeping-powders to not more than two pounds of
sleeping-powders per person per month in each household."

"Well, some one has got to do the worrying around here, Mawruss," Abe
said, "which if it rested with you, y'understand, we could make up a
line of samples for next season that wouldn't be no more like Paris
designs than General Pershing looks like his pictures in the magazines."

"Say, for that matter," Morris said, "we are just as good guessers as
our competitors; on account the way things is going nowadays, nobody is
going to try to make a trip to Paris to get fashion designs, because if
he figured on crossing the ocean to buy model gowns for the fall and
winter of nineteen-nineteen and nineteen-twenty, y'understand, between
the time that he applied for his pass