ch about the ship-building business, that you would
actually go to work and make up for the fall trade a line of whalebacks
in pastel shades? Honestly, Hurley, I must say I am surprised at you.'
And for the next twenty minutes he gives Hurley the names and dates of
six voluntary bankrupts, all of whom started in the ship-building
business by making up a line of whalebacks in pastel shades, together
with the details of just what them fellers is doing for a living to-day
from selling cigars on commission downwards.

"Naturally, Hurley hustles right back to the shop and tells the foreman
that if they 'ain't already started on that last batch of whalebacks in
pastel shades, not to mind, and he spends the rest of the afternoon
getting his operators busy on a couple of hundred oil-burning boats in
solid colors, like reds, greens, and blues. The consequence is that the
next day at lunch another old friend comes up to him, which used to was
in the ship-building business when the record from New York to Liverpool
was nineteen days ten hours and forty-five minutes, y'understand, and
says: '_Nu_, Hurley. How is the busy little ship-builder to-day?'

"'Pretty good,' Hurley says. 'I'm just getting to work on a big line of
oil-burners in solid colors, like reds, greens, and blues.'

"'No!' the old ship-builder says.

"'Sure!' Hurley tells him, and after they have said 'No!' and 'Sure!' a
couple of dozen times it appears that if a new beginner in the
ship-building business lays in a stock of plain-colored oil-burning
boats he might just so well kiss himself good-by with his ship-building
business and be done with it. Also it seems that the only line of goods
for a new beginner in the ship-building business to specialize in is
whalebacks in pastel shades, Abe, and that's the way it goes."

"At that we're a whole lot better off as England was when she started in
as a new beginner in the war business," Abe commented. "Mr. Hurley was,
anyhow, in the railroad business when he took over the ship-building
job, and we've got other men which were high-grade dry-goods and
hardware men before they threw up their business to help the government
branch out into the war business, y'understand, but if we would got to
depend on somebody who was trying to run a shipyard with the experience
he had got from being national lawn-tennis champion for the years
nineteen hundred to nineteen sixteen inclusive, or if President Wilson
had the idee that for a