lus ten per cent."

XVI

THE GERMAN ROMAN HOLIDAY AND THE AMERICANIZATION OF AMERICANS

"I was speaking to my wife's sister's boy which he is just getting ready
to gradgawate from High School, Mawruss, and I wish you could hear the
way that feller talks, Mawruss," Abe Potash said to his partner, Morris
Perlmutter.

"I shall probably got to have that pleasure, Abe," Morris Perlmutter
replied, "because the first thing your wife's relations does when they
gradgawate from school or go broke, as the case may be, is to get a job
in this place and the second thing they do is to get fired."

"Listen, Mawruss," Abe said, "if I would of given jobs in this place to
the number of relations by marriage which you already stuck me with,
y'understand, I might just so well run a free business college and be
done with it, which what I was going to say was that this here young
feller was telling me that in the old days when the Romans won a war the
way the Allies did, they used to make the losers walk in a parade so
that the Roman people could see how them losers suffered."

"And what's that got to do with my giving jobs to my wife's relations?"
Morris inquired.

"It 'ain't got nothing to do with it, but if you would let me open my
mouth once in a while and not try to gag me every time I want to tell
you something, Mawruss," Abe continued, "maybe I could learn you
something."

"Maybe," Morris admitted, "but when you start in to tell about how smart
one of your nephews by marriage is, Abe, it generally ends up by our
paying a few weeks' salary to a young feller which all he learned about
double entry is making birds with a pen, so I just want to warn you
before you go any further, Abe, that in the future with me, Abe, if any
of your nephews is an expert bird-maker with a pen, y'understand, you
should please find him a job in a millinery concern and let me out."

"I wasn't going to say nothing about giving a job to nobody," Abe
protested. "All I am trying to tell you is that if the Treaty of Peace,
which you talked my head off about the other day, contained a section
that the Germans should walk in a parade and show to the Allies how that
Peace Treaty made them suffer, Mawruss, Lenine and Trotsky and all the
other crickets who abuse Mr. Wilson like the New York Republican
newspapers and the American ladies who are attending that Zurich
Permanent Peace Convention, would of called the Allies all sorts of
barbarians, y'under