t, write, compose, or design
garments."

CHAPTER FIVE

ONE OF ESAU'S FABLES

THE MOUSE SCRATCHES THE LION'S BACK; THE LION SCRATCHES THE MOUSE'S BACK

"No, Elkan," said Louis Stout, of Flugel & Stout. "When you are coming
to compare Johnsonhurst _mit_ Burgess Park it's already a molehill to a
mountain."

"Burgess Park ain't such high ground neither," Elkan Lubliner retorted.
"Max Kovner says he lives out there on Linden Boulevard three months
only and he gets full up with malaria something terrible."

"Malaria we ain't got it in Burgess Park!" Louis declared. "I am living
there now six years, Elkan, and I never bought so much as a two-grain
quinine pill. Furthermore, Elkan, Kovner's malaria you could catch in
Denver, Colorado, or on an ocean steamer, y'understand; because, with a
lowlife bum like Max Kovner, which he sits up till all hours of the
night--a drinker and a gambler, understand me--you don't got to be a
professor exactly to diagonize his trouble. It ain't malaria, Elkan,
it's _Katzenjammer!_"

"But my Yetta is stuck on Johnsonhurst," Elkan protested, "and she
already makes up her mind we would move out there."

"That was just the way with my wife," Louis said. "For six months she is
crying all the time Ogden Estates; and if I would listen to her, Elkan,
and bought out there, y'understand, instead we would be turning down
offers on our house at an advance of twenty per cent. on the price we
paid for it, we would be considering letting the property go under
foreclosure! You ought to see that place Ogden Estates nowadays,
Elkan--nothing but a bunch of Italieners lives there."

"But----" Elkan began.

"Another thing," Louis Stout broke in: "Out in Johnsonhurst what kind of
society do you got? Moe Rabiner lives there, and Marks Pasinsky lives
there--and _Gott weiss wer noch_. My partner, Mr. Flugel, is approached
the other day with an offer of some property in Johnsonhurst, and I was
really in favour he should take it up; but he says to me, 'Louis,' he
says, 'a place where such people lives like Pasinsky and Rabiner I
wouldn't touch at all!' And he was right, Elkan. Salesmen and designers
only lives in Johnsonhurst; while out in Burgess Park we got a nice
class of people living, Elkan. You know J. Kamin, of the Lee Printemps,
Pittsburgh?"

"Used to was one of our best customers," Philip Scheikowitz replied,
"though he passed us up last year."

"His sister, Mrs. Benno Ortelsburg, lives one h