"It's already surprising what people will eat if they couldn't get anything else," Abe Potash commented one morning in June.
"Not nearly so surprising as what they would drink in the same circumstances," Morris Perlmutter remarked.
"Well, I don't know," Abe continued. "Here it stands in the newspapers where a professor says that for the information of them men which would sooner eat grasshoppers as starve, Mawruss, they taste very much like shrimps if you know how shrimps taste, which I am thankful to say that I don't, Mawruss, because I never yet had the nerve to eat shrimps on account of them looking too much like grasshoppers."
"That's nothing," Morris declared. "In Porto Rico, where they have had prohibition now for some time already, the authorities has just found out that the people has been drinking so much hair tonic as ersat-schnapps, Abe, that the insides of the stomach of a Porto-Rican looks like the outside of the President of the new Polish Republic, if you know what I mean."
"Well, if the prohibition law is going to be enforced so as to confiscate the schnapps which is now being stored away by the people who have had an insurance actuary figure out their expectancy of life at ten drinks a day for 13.31416 years, Mawruss, or all the cellar will hold, y'understand," Abe said, "it won't be much later than July 2d before somebody discovers that there's quite a kick to furniture polish or 6-in-1, Mawruss, and in fact I expect to see after July 1st, 1919, that there would be what looks like stove polish, shoe polish, automobile-body polish, and silver polish retailing at from one dollar to a dollar and a half per hip-pocket-size bottle, which after being strained through blotting-paper, y'understand, would net the purchaser three drinks of the worst whisky that ever got sold on Chatham Square for five cents a glass."
"And I suppose that pretty soon they will be passing a law forbidding the manufacture of stove polish and directing that the labels on the bottles shall contain the statement:
"Stove Polish by Volume 2, Seventy-five per cent. And in a thimbleful of what ain't stove polish in that stove polish, Abe, there wouldn't be no more harm than two or three quarts of so much nitroglycerin, y'understand," Morris said. "Also on Saturday nights you will see the poor women _nebich_ hanging around the swinging doors of paint and color stores right up to closing-time to see is their husbands inside, while the single men will stagger from house-furnishing store to house-furnishing store--or the Poor Men's Clubs, as they call them places where stove and silver polish is sold."