and pearls weighing from twenty to a hundred
carats apiece, Abe, they couldn't get an offer of as much as a bowl of
crackers and milk."

"What do you suppose happened to the originals, Mawruss?" Abe asked.

"What _should_ of happened to them?" Morris asked, rhetorically. "I bet
yer that not once, but hundreds of times, an Austrian emperor has taken
one of the ladies of the Vienna Opera House ballet to the vaults of the
Vienna Deposit and Storage Company and just to show her how much he
thought of her, when she said, '_My, ain't that a gorgeous stone!_' he
has said, '_Do you really like it?_' and pried it right out of its
setting right then and there."

"And I also bet yer that when the ballet lady got a valuation on it the
next day," Abe said, "the pawnbroker said to her, '_Ain't this a diamond
which the Emperor pried out of his crown for you?_' and when she said,
'_Yes_,' he says that the fixed loaning value of an imperial pried-out
diamond was one dollar and eighty-five cents, and from that time on the
ballet lady would be very much off all emperors."

"It seems to me that in all the other countries of the world where kings
and emperors still hold on to their jobs, Abe, it wouldn't be a bad
thing for the government to check up the crown jewels on them, in case
of emergencies like revolutions or having to pay war indemnities,"
Morris remarked, "which I wouldn't be surprised if right now the German
people is figuring on raising several million marks on the German crown
jewels towards paying the first billion-dollar instalment of the war
indemnity, and when the government appraiser gets ahold of them, he will
turn in a report that they are not even using that kind of stuff in
decorating soda-fountains even."

"In that case the German government will probably try to arrange a
swop," Abe said, "trusting to luck that the Allied governments having
agreed to take them crown jewels at the value placed on them by the
kaiser, will not discover their real value until they've changed hands,
Mawruss, in which event the German government will claim that the
substitution took place after the Allies received them and did the
Allies think they could get away with anything as raw as that."

"Even the Germans 'ain't got such a nerve," Morris commented.

"'Ain't they?" Abe retorted. "Well, how about the counter-claim they are
now making for an indemnity of $3,048,300,000, _aus gerechnent_? Them
Germans has got the nerve to claim a