"Well, that would make them popular with me, anyhow," Abe said, "and there is probably millions of people like me in that respects, Mawruss. Still, joking to one side, Mawruss, there is some things which you couldn't joke about like what this young feller Read did, which is working for the United States navy, Mawruss. There was a young feller what took his life in his hands, Mawruss, and yet from the maps which the newspapers printed, you would think it was already a dead open-and-shut proposition that if the airyoplane was to break down anywheres between Trespassing and Europe, Mawruss, there would be waiting United States navy ships like taxi-cabs around the Hotel Knickerbocker, waiting to pick up this here Read before he even so much as got his feet wet, understand me. Yes, Mawruss, right across the whole page of the newspaper was strung the Winthrop, the Farragut, the Cushing, and other fellers' names up to the number of fourteen destroyers, and the way it looked on that map, there was a solid line of boats waiting to receive any falling airyoplane all the way from one side of the ocean to the other, whereas you know as well as I do, Mawruss, you can as much make both ends meet on the Atlantic Ocean with fourteen ships as a shipping-clerk with ten children can in New York City on a salary of eighteen dollars a week."
"I understand them ships was only fifty miles apart," Morris observed.
"Sure, I know," Abe agreed, "but if that airyoplane was to drop anywheres between the second and the forty-ninth mile, Mawruss, them ships might just as well have been stationed on the North River between Seventy-second and One Hundred and Thirtieth streets, Mawruss, for all the good it would have done this young feller Read. Also, Mawruss, if they would have had so many destroyers on the Atlantic Ocean that they would have run out of regular navy names for them and had to resort to the business directory so as to include the Acker, the Merrall, the Condit, the Rogers, the Peet, the Browning, the King, the Marshall, and the Field, in that collection of ships, Mawruss, that wouldn't of made this here Read's life a first-class insurable risk, neither."
"And being picked up by a destroyer ain't such a wonderful Capora, neither, y'understand," Morris said, "which they tell me that on one of them destroyers an admiral even couldn't last out as far as the Battery even without anyhow getting pale. Also, Abe, I couldn't see that it proved anything when this here Read had the good luck to arrive at Lisbon, except that he was a brave young feller and seemingly didn't care how much his family worried about him."
"That's what people have always said when anything new in the way of transportation was tried, Mawruss, but them people was never the ones that deposited the checks when the scheme begun to pay dividends some two or three years later," Abe retorted. "The world never made no advances with the assistance of the even-so and what-of-it fellers, which, when the king and queen of Spain raised a little money on the crown jewels, Mawruss, so that Christopher Columbus olav hasholom could make the first trip across the Atlantic Ocean by water, Mawruss, the people which saw in it the first steps towards the Aquitania and Levinathan wasn't so plentiful, neither."
"Probably the feller which lent the money on the jewels wasn't so enthusiastic about it, at any rate," Morris declared, "because as first-class, A-number-one security for a loan, Abe, crown jewels 'ain't got very much of an edge on them sympathetic pearls which carries such a tremendous overhead for electric light in the store windows where they are displayed. Take, for instance, the Austrian crown jewels, Abe, and I see in the paper where for years and years everybody took the Austrian emperor's word for it that they contained more first-water diamonds than could be found in stocks of all the Fifth Avenue jewelers and Follies of from 1910 to 1919 chorus ladies combined, and the other day when the provisional government tried to sell them Austrian crown jewels to buy food for the starving Austrians, y'understand, for what was thought to be rubies, diamonds, and pearls weighing from twenty to a hundred carats apiece, Abe, they couldn't get an offer of as much as a bowl of crackers and milk."
"What do you suppose happened to the originals, Mawruss?" Abe asked.
"What should of happened to them?" Morris asked, rhetorically. "I bet yer that not once, but hundreds of times, an Austrian emperor has taken one of the ladies of the Vienna Opera House ballet to the vaults of the Vienna Deposit and Storage Company and just to show her how much he thought of her, when she said, 'My, ain't that a gorgeous stone!' he has said, 'Do you really like it?' and pried it right out of its setting right then and there."
"And I also bet yer that when the ballet lady got a valuation on it the next day," Abe said, "the pawnbroker said to her, 'Ain't this a diamond which the Emperor pried out of his crown for you?' and when she said, 'Yes,' he says that the fixed loaning value of an imperial pried-out diamond was one dollar and eighty-five cents, and from that time on the ballet lady would be very much off all emperors."
"It seems to me that in all the other countries of the world where kings and emperors still hold on to their jobs, Abe, it wouldn't be a bad thing for the government to check up the crown jewels on them, in case of emergencies like revolutions or having to pay war indemnities," Morris remarked, "which I wouldn't be surprised if right now the German people is figuring on raising several million marks on the German crown jewels towards paying the first billion-dollar instalment of the war indemnity, and when the government appraiser gets ahold of them, he will turn in a report that they are not even using that kind of stuff in decorating soda-fountains even."