"And suppose she did shrink a little," Morris said, "she could have been anyhow disposed of '_as is_' to somebody who didn't take it so particular to the fraction of an inch how much yellow pine he gets in a yellow-pine ship."
"I give you right, Mawruss," Abe agreed, "but then, you see, an idee like that would never occur to a professional expert, Mawruss, because it has the one big objection that it might prove the other experts was right when they didn't agree with him, which that is the trouble with professional experts. The important thing to them ain't so much the articles on which they experts, as what big experts they are on such articles.
"Take this here Lewis machine-gun, Mawruss," Abe continued, "and when Colonel Lewis puts it up to the army experts, y'understand, naturally them experts says, 'Well, if we are such big experts on machine-guns, we should ought to know a whole lot more about machine-guns as Colonel Lewis, and what does that _Schlemiel_ know about machine-guns, _anyway_?' so they sent Colonel Lewis a notice that they would not be responsible for goods left over thirty days, and the consequence was Colonel Lewis sold his machine-gun to the English army."
"And he didn't have to be such a cracker-jack high-grade A-number-one salesman to do that, neither," Morris commented, "because if his only talking point to the English experts was that the American experts had turned down his gun, y'understand, the English experts would give him a big order without even asking him to unpack his samples."
"Sure, I know," Abe said. "But if Colonel Lewis would of had the interests of America at heart, Mawruss, he should ought to have offered his machine-gun to the English experts first, understand me, and after he had got out of the observation ward, which the English experts would just naturally send him to as a dangerous American crank with a foolish idea for a machine-gun, y'understand, the American experts would have taken his entire output at his own terms."
[Illustration: "'Well, if we are such big experts on machine-guns, we should ought to know a whole lot more about machine-guns as Colonel Lewis, and what does that _Schlemiel_ know about machine-guns, _anyway_?'"]