In the meantime the delinquent local secretary-manager turned up and I was fully prepared to annihilate him for his lack of proper preliminary advertising for our concert, but as he immediately called me “Cher maître” and expressed his delight in such eloquent French at the coming of so notable an organization as ours, he completely spiked my guns and I found myself unable to get in a word edgewise, much less tell him what I really thought of him. I have told before that he was an amateur double-bass player in the local orchestra, and this was evidently the ruling passion of his life, although I never could understand why an amateur should choose this particular instrument for his delectation. After the second concert and while the hall was still ringing with the shouts of the fiery citizens of Marseilles, he came into my dressing-room as I thought to add his tribute of praise, but, alas, all he said was: “Cher maître, I could hardly hear your double-bass players during the entire concert.” I presume that at the concerts of his orchestra he was so taken up with his own double-bass part that as he played he heard nothing of the other instruments around and about him. He became, so to speak, intoxicated with the resonance of his own instrument. At our concert, seated in the audience, he suddenly found, poor man, that the double-bass was not the only pebble on the orchestral beach, and that occasionally the violins, the wood winds, or the brasses had also something of importance to enunciate. It must have been a sad revelation to him, and I do not wonder that he refused to accept it. In the meantime the strike fever was spreading in every direction, and there was not a trolley running through the town of Marseilles nor a boat leaving the harbor. The effect was a very curious one, as the streets were filled with great crowds restlessly moving up and down, and seemingly without work or affairs of any kind to keep them busy. In several of the streets small bands were playing in roped-off circles while thirty couples or so were dancing madly around with hundreds of others outside the ropes watching them. The huge audience who arrived for our Sunday afternoon concert must have come on foot, as there was not a wheel turning anywhere.