One tower was safely lodged on the shelf.  But was it?  It was not!  Yes?  No!  It curved; it straightened; it curved again.  The excitement was as keen as that of watching a drowning man attempt to reach the shore.  It was simply excruciating.  It could not be borne any longer, and when it could not be borne any longer the tower sprawled irrevocably and seven dozen plates fell in a cascade on the violet hat, and so with an inconceivable clatter to the floor.  Almost at the same moment the being in the dress-suit and the eyeglass, becoming aware of phenomena slightly unusual even in a restaurant, dropped his eyeglass, turned round to the sideboard and received the other waiter’s seven dozen plates in the face and on the crown of his head.

No such effect had ever been seen in the Five Towns, and the felicity of the audience exceeded all previous felicities.  The audience yelled, roared, shrieked, gasped, trembled, and punched itself in a furious passion of pleasure.  They make plates in the Five Towns.  They live by making plates.  They understand plates.  In the Five Towns a man will carry not seven but twenty-seven dozen plates on a swaying plank for eight hours a day up steps and down steps, and in doorways and out of doorways, and not break one plate in seven years!  Judge, therefore, the simple but terrific satisfaction of a Five Towns audience in the hugeness of the calamity.  Moreover, every plate smashed means a demand for a new plate and increased prosperity for the Five Towns.  The grateful crowd in the auditorium of the Empire would have covered the stage with wreaths, if it had known that wreaths were used for other occasions than funerals; which it did not know.

Fresh complications instantly ensued, which cruelly cut short the agreeable exercise of uncontrolled laughter.  It was obvious that one of the waiters was about to fall.  And in the enforced tranquillity of a new dread every dyspeptic person in the house was deliciously conscious of a sudden freedom from indigestion due to the agreeable exercise of uncontrolled laughter, and wished fervently that he could laugh like that after every meal.  The waiter fell; he fell through the large violet hat and disappeared beneath the surface of a sea of crockery.  The other waiter fell too, but the sea was not deep enough to drown a couple of them.  Then the customers, recovering themselves, decided that they must not be outclassed in this competition of havoc, and they overthrew the table and everything on it, and all the other tables and everything on all the other tables.  The audience was now a field of artillery which nothing could silence.  The waiters arose, and, opening the sideboard, disclosed many hundreds of unsuspected plates of all kinds, ripe for smashing.  Niagaras of plates surged on to the stage.  All four performers revelled and wallowed in smashed plates.  New supplies of plates were constantly being produced from strange concealments, and finally the tables and chairs were broken to pieces, and each object on the walls was torn down and flung in bits on to the gorgeous general debris, to the top of which clambered the violet hat, necklace and yellow petticoat, brandishing one single little plate, whose life had been miraculously spared.  Shrieks of joy in that little plate played over the din like lightning in a thunderstorm.  And the curtain fell.