From beginning to end, from the initial bar to the final cadenza, there isn’t a pianissimo movement in the whole operatic celebration, or symphony, or overture, or musical festival, or whatever you like to call it. It’s all fortissimo, awfully fortissimo, say about four-hundred-and-forty-four tissimo.
The good men and true of Sandy Row determined that they would submit to this invasion of their rights, this outrage upon their dignity, this systematic suppression of their slumbers, no longer. The amount of old boots, stray bottles, broken candlesticks, and used-up culinary utensils with which those cats had been bombarded would have established a flourishing marine store business, but these munitions of war had been exhausted without disabling a single cat. It was evident that desperate measures were necessary to restore law and order in Green’s back yard. They were adopted.
Unfortunately for Green, his neighbors acted in skirmishing order--each man on his own account; no general plan of organization; no commander--a kind of guerilla warfare, in fact, was to be waged on the melodiously maddening marauders!
Jones got a blunderbuss and loaded it to the muzzle with broken glass, rusty nails, buckshot, and darning needles.
Tomlinson, the tailor, carted in a load of half-bricks and paving stones, and piled them up in his bedroom for action.
The grocer laid a three-inch hose on to the pipe in his scullery, and completed scientific arrangements for a powerful pressure.
Poor Green himself, whose repeated failures from the back window as a marksman had disgusted him with that method of attack, got a long cavalry sword, and determined to tackle the enemy with cold steel.
Alas! there was no preliminary consultation. Why, oh, why, was not Lord Rossmore there to direct the strategy of these noble defenders of homes and altars, civil and religious liberty, and uninterrupted snores?
About 11.30 on New-Year’s night, the quadrupedal Pattis and Nicolinis commenced their usual grand concert. Green waited patiently until they had got through the preliminary solos, but when they commenced some Wagnerian horror in chorus, he slipped out silently, in wrath and his night-shirt, and crept, sword in hand, towards the fatal shed.