r fellers which went to
Italy, Abe, and he says that he listened carefully to all the speeches
which was made in Italian, Mawruss, and that once he thought he heard
the word Chianti mentioned, but he couldn't say for certain. He told me,
however, that the correspondent of _The New York Evening Post_ also
claims that he heard Orlando, the Prime Minister, in a speech delivered
in Rome, use the words Il Trovatore, but that otherwise the whole thing
was like having the misfortune to see somebody give an imitation of
Eddie Foy when you've escaped seeing Eddie Foy in the first place, so
you can imagine what chance Mr. Wilson would have stood with them
Italians if the American correspondents hadn't been along to start the
cries of 'Bravo!' in the right spot.

"So you see, Abe, it's a good thing for them newspaper men to see what
kind of people the Italians is in their own country," Morris continued,
"because if this here League of Nations idea is going to be put over by
Mr. Wilson, Americans should ought to know from the start that Italy is
a Big League nation and its batting average in this war is just as good
as the other Big League nations."

"Did any one say it wasn't?" Abe demanded.

"I know they didn't," Morris said. "But just the same, Abe, there's a
whole lot of people in America which judges the Italians by the way they
behave in the ice business and 'Cavalleria Rusticana,' and also a feller
can get a very unfavorable opinion of Italians by being shaved in one of
them ten-cent palace barber shops, understand me, so even if them
newspaper men couldn't appreciate the performance without a libretto,
y'understand, they could anyhow see for themselves that the Italians in
Italy is doctors and lawyers, clothing-dealers and bankers, just the
same like the Americans are in America, and if they can pass the word
back home, with a few details of how it feels to be a foreigner in a
foreign country, that wouldn't do no harm, neither."

"That is something which an American newspaper correspondent wouldn't
touch on at all," Abe said, "because I bet that every last one of them
has already sent back to America an article about this trip to Italy,
which, when the readers of his newspaper looks at it, Mawruss, not only
would they think that he understood Sonnino's speech from start to
finish, y'understand, but also that every time the newspaper feller is
in Rome, which the article would lead one to believe has been on an
average of