t boat for Trespassing, or whatever the
place is. Then all they have to do is to make a good start, and get
afterwards rescued by a tramp steamer, and right away they become
general favorites again. Or the kaiser and the crown prince might try
it, Mawruss. There must be plenty of airyoplanes laying around Germany
nowadays which could be picked up for a song, and when word come that it
had fallen into the Atlantic Ocean with them two birds aboard somewhere
around one thousand five hundred miles from sixty degrees forty-three
minutes, y'understand, it might make the Hohenzollerns so popular that
there would be a counter-revolution or something."

"But suppose they would overdo the thing and not get rescued," Morris
suggested.

"Well, that would make them popular with _me_, anyhow," Abe said, "and
there is probably millions of people like me in that respects, Mawruss.
Still, joking to one side, Mawruss, there is some things which you
couldn't joke about like what this young feller Read did, which is
working for the United States navy, Mawruss. There was a young feller
what took his life in his hands, Mawruss, and yet from the maps which
the newspapers printed, you would think it was already a dead
open-and-shut proposition that if the airyoplane was to break down
anywheres between Trespassing and Europe, Mawruss, there would be
waiting United States navy ships like taxi-cabs around the Hotel
Knickerbocker, waiting to pick up this here Read before he even so much
as got his feet wet, understand me. Yes, Mawruss, right across the whole
page of the newspaper was strung the _Winthrop_, the _Farragut_, the
_Cushing_, and other fellers' names up to the number of fourteen
destroyers, and the way it looked on that map, there was a solid line of
boats waiting to receive any falling airyoplane all the way from one
side of the ocean to the other, whereas you know as well as I do,
Mawruss, you can as much make both ends meet on the Atlantic Ocean with
fourteen ships as a shipping-clerk with ten children can in New York
City on a salary of eighteen dollars a week."

"I understand them ships was only fifty miles apart," Morris observed.

"Sure, I know," Abe agreed, "but if that airyoplane was to drop
anywheres between the second and the forty-ninth mile, Mawruss, them
ships might just as well have been stationed on the North River between
Seventy-second and One Hundred and Thirtieth streets, Mawruss, for all
the good it would have d