g.

"What they want to do in Russland," Abe Potash declared, one morning in
November, "is to have one last revolution, and stick _to_ it."

"It ain't Russia which is having them revolutions," Morris Perlmutter
observed. "It's the Russian revolutionists. Them boys have been standing
around doing nothing for years, Abe, in fact ever since nineteen five,
and now that they got a job they figure that why should they finish it
up, because revolutionists' work is piece-work, and just so soon as a
revolution is over, as a general thing, the revolutionists gets laid
off--up against a wall at sunrise."

"Well, them boys is certainly nursing their job this time, Mawruss," Abe
continued. "The way them fellers is acting up over there it wouldn't
surprise me a bit if most of the Russian merchants would move to
Mexico, so as they could carry on their business in peace and quietness,
y'understand. What the idea of all these here revolutions is I don't
know. They've got the Czar living in a cold-water walk-up, and you could
go the length and breadth of Russia with a ballet-dancer as a decoy
without running across so much as one grand duke peeking through the
window-blinds, y'understand. So what more do them Russians want?"

"For one thing," Morris explained, "the peasants insists that all the
land in Russland should be divided up between them."

"What for?" Abe asked.

"They probably see a chance to get a little real estate free of charge,"
Morris replied.

"_Aber_ what good would that do them?" Abe said. "Because in a country
where revolutions is liable to happen every day in the week except
Saturdays from nine to twelve-thirty, y'understand, there ain't much
market for real estate, and, besides, Mawruss, if them poor peasants
only knew what a dawg's life it is in the real-estate business,
understand me, even when times is good, they would of got such
_Rachmonos_ for the Czar with his twenty-two million five hundred and
forty-three thousand two hundred and twenty-nine versts of unimproved
property, that instead of getting up a revolution, they would of got up
a meeting and passed resolutions of sympathy."

"The chances is they would of done it, anyway, if it wouldn't been for
this here Kerensky," Morris declared. "What that feller don't know
about running a revolution, Abe, if Carranza, Villa, and Huerta would
have known it, they would have had two years ago already a chain of
five-and-ten-cent revolutions doing a good busin