e in war-times ain't
such a cinch, neither. Take in the old times before the war, and if a
trunk railroad got wrecked, y'understand, people stayed interested long
enough so that even if the article about how the head of the guilty
banking concern worked his way up didn't appear till three months
afterward, it was still good, but you take it to-day, Mawruss, and the
chances is that a dozen articles about how Leon Trotzky used to was a
feller by the name Braustein which are now slated to be put into the May
edition of the magazine is going to be killed along with Trotzky
somewheres about the middle of next month. In fact, Mawruss, things
happen so thick and fast in this war that three months from now the only
thing that people is going to remember about Brest-Litovsk and
Galli-Curci will be the hyphens, and they won't be able to say offhand
whether or not it was Brest-Litovsk that had the soprano voice or the
peace conference."

"Well, if a magazine editor gets stumped for something to take the place
of an article which went sour on him, Abe," Morris suggested, "he could
always print a story about a beautiful lady spy, and usually does,
y'understand, which the way them amateur spy-hunters gets their dope
from reading magazines nowadays, Abe, if the magazines prints any more
of them beautiful lady-spy stories, y'understand, a beautiful face on a
lady is soon going to be as suspicious-looking as Heidelberg dueling
scars on a man, and it's bound to have quite an adverse effect on the
complexion-cream business."

"But you've got to hand it to these magazine editors, Mawruss," Abe
said. "They ain't afraid to print articles which coppers the
advertisements in the back pages. I am reading only this morning an
article which it says on page twenty-eight of the magazine that people
in Berlin is getting made _Geheimeraths_ and having eagles hung on them
by the Kaiser in all shades from red to Copenhagen blue for helping out
Germany in this war by doing things that ain't one, two, six compared
with what a feller in New York does when he buys a fifteen-hundred-dollar
automobile, y'understand, and yet on pages thirty, thirty-two,
thirty-eight, forty, and all the other pages from forty-one to fifty
inclusive, the same magazine prints advertisements of automobiles costing
from ten thousand dollars downwards, F.O.B. a freight-car in Detroit which
should ought to be filled with ship-building material F.O.B. Newark, N.J."

"That ain't th