production was wonderful, and that such a really remarkable
breath control, y'understand, they hadn't heard it since Adelina Patti
in her palmiest days, and I bet yer if Doctor Muck was to take that song
and set it to music so as the Boston Symphony Orchestra could play it
them same people and plenty like them would say that the wood wind was
this, the strings was that, and something about the coda and the
obbligato, y'understand. In fact, Mawruss, they wouldn't care what they
said, just so long as they could give the impression that they was
regular sharks when it come to music, but what kind of impression they
gave when it come to patriotism and common sense, such people seemingly
don't give a nickel.

"Why, you take this here lady singer at the Metropolitan Opera House,"
Abe continued, "which her husband was agent for the Krupp Manufacturing
Company, and when she got fired, y'understand, it looked like some of
these here breath-control and tone-production experts was going to hold
a meeting and regularly move and second that a copy of the said
resolutions suitably engrossed be transmitted to her, care of Krupp
Manufacturing Company, Twenty forty-two, four six, and eight Buelow
Boulevard, Essen, on account she had been working for the Metropolitan
Opera House for pretty near twenty years, which the way some of them
singers goes on singing year after year at the Metropolitan Opera House,
Mawruss, sometimes you couldn't tell whether the Metropolitan Opera
House was an opera-house or a home, y'understand."

"That's neither here nor there, Abe," Morris said. "There ain't no
reason to my mind why the Metropolitan Opera House shouldn't ought to
hire ladies whose husbands is working for American concerns or is out of
a job, y'understand, and also it wouldn't be a bad idea to see that some
of them barytones and bassos which was formerly sending home every week
from two to five hundred dollars apiece to the old folks in
Charlottenburg and Wilmersdorf, y'understand, give up their places to a
few native-born fellers who contributed to the first and second Liberty
Loans, understand me, and ain't supporting a relation in the world."

"But the point which them coda and obbligato fans make is that if a
feller like this here Captain Kreisler of the Austrian army is the best
fiddler in existence, y'understand, it's up to us Americans to pay two
dollars and fifty cents a throw, not including war tax, to hear him
fiddle, and that we