"All right, if it's such a crime not to know what a coloratura soprano is, Abe," Morris commented, "I'm guilty in the first degree. So go ahead, Abe. I'm willing to take my punishment. Tell me, what _is_ a coloratura soprano?"
"I suppose you think I don't know," Abe said.
"I don't think you don't know," Morris replied, "but I do think that the only reason you _do_ know, Abe, is that you 'ain't looked it up long enough since to have forgotten it."
"Is _that_ so!" Abe exclaimed. "Well, that's where you make a big mistake. I am already an experienced hand at going on the opera. When I was by Old Man Baum we had a customer by the name Harris Feinsilver, which if you only get him started on how he heard Jenny Lind at what is now the Aquarium in Battery Park somewheres around eighteen hundred and fifty-two, y'understand, you could sell him every sticker in the place, and him and me went often on the opera together. In fact I got so that I didn't mind it at all, and that's how I become acquainted with the different grades of singers which works by grand opera. Take, for instance, sopranos, and they come in two classes. There is the soprano which hollers murder police and they call her a dramatic soprano. And then again there is the soprano which gargles. That is a coloratura soprano."
"And people is paying forty dollars an orchestra seat to hear a woman gargle?" Morris exclaimed.
"Of course I don't say she actually gargles, y'understand," Abe explained, "anyhow not all the time, Mawruss. Once in a while she sings a song which has got quite a tune in it pretty near up to the end, and then she carries on something terrible anywheres from two to eight minutes till the feller that runs the orchestra couldn't stand it no longer and he gives them the signal they should drown her out."
[Illustration: "Take, for instance, sopranos, and they come in two classes. There is the soprano which hollers murder police and they call her a dramatic soprano. And then again there is the soprano which gargles. That is a coloratura soprano."]
"I should think he would get to know when it is coming on her and drown her out before she starts," Morris said.
"What do you mean--drown her out before she starts?" Abe continued. "That's what she gets paid for--carrying on in such a manner, and them people up in the top gallery goes crazy over it."