thing, and
from the way he puts his hand on his heart it looks like he is also
telling them that he is speaking to them as a friend, y'understand, and
to consider their wives and children, understand me. All the effect this
seems to have on them is that they yell, 'Down with the bosses!' and
they insist on a closed shop and that the terms of the protocol should
be lived up to. This gets Caruso crazy. He grabs his vest with both
hands and makes one last big appeal, y'understand, in which he tells
them that the delegates is stalling and that they are being made suckers
of, and that if it would be the last word he would ever speak, the
sensible thing is for them to go right back to work and leave it to
arbitration by a joint board consisting of the president of the
Manufacturers' Association, the chairman of the Garment Workers' Union,
and Jacob H. Schiff, y'understand, but do you think they would listen to
him? _Oser a Stueck!_ They laugh in his face, and it don't make no
difference that he repeats it an octave higher accompanied by the
fiddles, and gives them one last chance, ending on a high C,
y'understand, they refuse to reconsider the matter, and when the curtain
goes down it looks like the strike was on for fair. However, when the
lights are turned on and you look it up in the English translation, what
do you find? The entire thing was a false alarm, Mawruss. It seems that
for twenty minutes Caruso has been singing over and over again, 'Come,
my friends, let us go,' and the whole time them people was acting like
they wanted to tear him to pieces, they have been saying, 'Yes, yes, let
us go' a thousand times over, and that's all there was _to_ it."

"Well, after all, with a grand opera, it ain't so much the words as the
music," Morris commented.

"Even the music they don't take it so particular about nowadays," Abe
continued. "In fact, the up-to-date thing in grand opera is not to have
any music, Mawruss, only samples, which some of them newest grand
operas, Mawruss, if it wouldn't be that the people on the stage is
making such a racket instead of the people in the audience you would
think that the orchestra was continuing to tune up during the entire
evening."

"Seemingly you didn't get a whole lot out of your visits to the opera,
Abe," Morris said.

"Oh yes, I did," Abe replied. "I got some wonderful idees for
dinner-dress designs and evening gowns. I 'ain't got no kick coming
against the opera, Mawruss. A gar