§ 8 The Spirit of Seventy-six, With Improvements
A New York East Sider met a friend on Third Avenue and told him he had quit the buttonhole-making trade.
“I’m in the art business now,” he said, proudly—“such a fine business, too! Lots of money in it!”
“What do you mean—art business?” demanded his friend.
“Well,” explained the East Sider, “I go by auction sales, and I buy pictures cheap; then I sell ’em high. Yesterday I bought a picture for twenty-five dollars and to-day I sold it for fifty.”
“What was the subject?”
“It wasn’t no subject at all,” said the art collector—“it was a picture.”
“Sure, I know,” said the other. “But every picture has got to be a subject or it ain’t a regular picture, you understand. Was this here picture a marine, or a landscape, or a still life, or a portrait—or what?”
“How should I know?” said the puzzled ex-buttonholer. “To me a picture is a picture! This here picture now didn’t have no name. It was a picture of three fellers. One feller had a fife and one feller had a drum and one feller had a headache!”