ifty hand
in spades, with an extra ace and king, understand me, when I happened to
think about reading in the paper where the Germans is going to build for
next spring submarines in extra sized six hundred feet long,
y'understand, and the consequence was I forget to meld a twenty in clubs
and lost the hand by eighteen points. Before I fell asleep that night I
thought it over that Germany couldn't build such a big submarine as the
papers claimed, but by that time I was out three dollars on the hand,
_anyway_, and that's the way war affects _me_, Mawruss."

"Well, that's where you are making a big mistake, Abe," Morris
commented, "because even when the articles which they print in the
newspaper is true, y'understand, if you only stop to figure them out
right, Abe, you could get a whole lot of encouragement that way. Take,
for instance, when you read _via_ Amsterdam that General Hindenberg is
now commanding the western front, Abe, and with some people that would
throw a big scare into 'em, y'understand, but with me not, Abe, because
the way I look at it is from experience. I've known lots of fellers from
seventy to seventy-five years old, Abe, and in particular my wife's
mother's a brother Old Man Baum in the cotton-converting business.
There's a feller which he actually went to work and married his
stenographer when he was seventy-two, Abe, and, compared to an
undertaking like that, running the western front would be child's play,
Abe, and yet when all was said and done, if he went to theayter Saturday
night and eats afterward a little chicken _a la_ King, y'understand, it
was a case of ringing up a doctor at three o'clock Sunday morning while
his wife's relations sat around his flat figuring the inheritance tax.
Now, take Hindenberg which he is six months older as Old Man Baum, Abe,
and what that feller has went through in the last three years two
lifetimes in the cotton-converting business wouldn't be a marker to it,
understand me, and still there are people which is worried that when he
begins to run things on the western front, it is going to be a serious
matter for the Allies, instead of the Germans.

"Yes, Abe," Morris continued, "with all the things them Germans has got
to attend to on the western front, it's no cinch to have on their hands
an old man seventy-two years of age, which, if anything should happen to
the old _Rosher_, like acute indigestion from eating too much gruel or
lumbago, y'understand, then real