“Oh, how it makes me feel to hear dose oxpressions!—”
—“still say to himself again as he had, said a hundred times before, the art of the Saltmarsh-Handel is an art apart, there is nothing in the heavens above or in the earth beneath that resembles it,—”
“Py chiminy, nur hören Sie einmal! In my life day haf I never heard so brecious worts.”
“So I talked him out of the hack, Mr. Tracy, and he let up on that, and said put in a hearse, then—because he’s chief mate of a hearse but don’t own it—stands a watch for wages, you know. But I can’t do a hearse any more than I can a hack; so here we are—becalmed, you see. And it’s the same with women and such. They come and they want a little johnry picture—”
“It’s the accessories that make it a genre?”
“Yes—cannon, or cat, or any little thing like that, that you heave in to whoop up the effect. We could do a prodigious trade with the women if we could foreground the things they like, but they don’t give a damn for artillery. Mine’s the lack,” continued the captain with a sigh, “Andy’s end of the business is all right I tell you he’s an artist from way back!”
“Yoost hear dot old man! He always talk ’poud me like dot,” purred the pleased German.
“Look at his work yourself! Fourteen portraits in a row. And no two of them alike.”
“Now that you speak of it, it is true; I hadn’t noticed it before. It is very remarkable. Unique, I suppose.”
“I should say so. That’s the very thing about Andy—he discriminates. Discrimination’s the thief of time—forty-ninth Psalm; but that ain’t any matter, it’s the honest thing, and it pays in the end.”