the human flood has rushed on, leaving no one to whom you can explain just how you thought you smelled fire and beat the world to the engine-house. So you set out for the fire yourself and jog over the half-mile in pretty fair time, considering the heat. It is an impressive sight—not the fire itself, but the event. Two thousand, two hundred and nine people are there—that being the population of Homeburg minus the sick and wandering.

In the midst of the seething mass are the hose-cart and the ladder-truck. Around them dozens of red helmets are bobbing, while the quivering air is cut and slashed and mangled with a very hurricane of orders: "Bring up that hose—" "Whoa, keep that horse still—" "Bring her round this way—" "Bring her round this way—" "Hey, you chumps, the fire's this side—" "Back up that wagon—" "Come ahead with the wagon—" "Get out of here till we get a ladder up—" "Axes here—" "Turn on that water—" "Turn on that water—" "Turn on that water!!—" "Jones, go down and tell that wooden Indian to turn on that water." "Hold that water, you—" "Hold that water!" "Turn her on, I say." "Turn her—" "Wow—turn that nozzle the other way—"

And then the water comes with a mighty rush, yanking the nozzlemen this way and that and sweeping firemen and common citizens aside as if they were mere straws.

As a rule, this is the climax, and the end comes rapidly. By this time Brown, who had put the fire out with a few pails of water before the alarm sounded, has persuaded the department to call off its hose, the barn being full of valuable hay. So there isn't anything to do. The water is turned off. Gibb Ogle explains to the one hundred and eleventh knot of people how he was going past the place when he saw the tongue of flame, and every one disperses after a pleasant social time.

Everybody is tolerably well satisfied except the hook-and-ladder gang, which, as usual, is skunked again—never got a ladder out. A couple of the axmen had a little fun with a rear window, but otherwise the affair is a flat failure. They go back sullenly, but are comforted when the roll is called, when each member who was present draws a dollar from the city treasury. As usual, Pete Sundbloom is late, and tries to edge in to roll-call, though he was a mile away from peril, but he can't make it stick and gets the hoarse hoot when his little game is discovered.

I want to ask you—isn't that a pleasant interruption on a dead day? It makes life worth living, and I really wonder that there isn't more incendiarism in small towns throughout the United States.

Of course all the alarms aren't fizzles. Sometimes we have a real fire, and then the scene defies description. When a fair-sized house burns down, Chief Dobbs is so hoarse that he can't talk for a week, and when the row of wooden stores on the south side went up in flames a few years ago, the old chief, Patrick McQuinn, burst a blood-vessel and had to retire, the doctor having warned him that he must never use a speaking-trumpet again.

I was away at the time, but they tell me that was a grand fire for the hook-and-ladder boys. They were right in the middle of it, and every ladder in the truck was out. There was some trouble over the fact that the big extension ladder was too tall for the buildings, and when Art Simms had climbed to the top, he managed to fall fifteen feet to the roof of the furniture-store, bruising himself badly. But, on the whole, great good was done, and the second story workers were kings that day. When the hotel caught, and the hook-and-ladder gang got into it, the way the upper windows belched mattresses, mirrors, toilet-sets, pictures and beds was unbelievable. Almost everything in the building was saved, and some of it was successfully repaired afterward.

The axmen had their innings that day, too. It was a great sight to see Andy Lowes leap nimbly up the ladder and poke in window after window with his spiked ax, stepping backward now and then into nozzleman Jones's face in order to view the effect. The axmen got glory enough to last for years, and it was an axman who put out the last scrap of fire. Frank Sundell was the hero. He was sitting on the ridge-pole of Emerson's restaurant when he noticed a few blazing spots on the shingle roof beneath him. He might have called the hose department; but, as I have said, there is a good deal of rivalry between the two, and, besides, Sundell had had a slow time that day, Lowes doing most of the display work. So Frank reached cautiously down with his trusty ax, cut out a blazing section of shingles, and tossed it to the ground. The crowd cheered, and he was so encouraged that he cut out the rest of the hot spots and put out the fire single-handed. Sundell is one of our very best firemen and stands in line for a nozzleman's position some day.

Of course a small-town fire department doesn't get as much practice in twisting the fire-fiend's tail as a city fire company; but our boys have a mighty good record, and we're proud of them. Since we've had water-works, and the department hasn't had to depend on some cistern which always went dry just at a critical moment, there hasn't been a conflagration in Homeburg big enough to get into the city papers. The boys may be a little overzealous now and then, but they are always on the job ten minutes after the first tap of the bell, and the way they go after a red tongue of flame on a kitchen roof reminds me of a terrier shaking a rat. They are our real heroes,—the fire-laddies,—for outside of Frank Ericson and Shorty McGrew, who work on the switching-crew, and come sailing down through town hanging gracefully from the end of a box-car ladder by one foot and hand, no one else has any chance to face danger in Homeburg.

Of course our firemen don't face danger regularly, between meals, like your big paid departments here, and about the most the ordinary business man gets in the danger-line is the imminent peril of getting a new twenty-five-dollar suit in line with the chemical hose; but we don't forget in Homeburg how old Mrs. Agnew's house burned twenty years ago this spring and the department was late, owing to the magnificent depth of Exchange Street, the roads having broken up, and how, when it got there, the house was a mass of flames, with the poor old lady, who had been bedridden for years, shrieking inside, and a hundred neighbors shrieking on the outside; and how Pat McQuinn and Henry Aultmeyer dove in through a window, with wet coats around their heads and the chemical-hose playing on their backs; and how they tugged and hauled at Mrs. Agnew, who weighed two hundred and fifty pounds, and couldn't get a grip on her, and finally upended the burning bed and dumped her out of the window, breaking her hip, and then dumped themselves out and rolled in the wet grass until their hair and mustaches and clothes quit blazing—after which they retired into cotton-wool for a month.

Maybe your men would have done it more scientifically and entirely saved poor Mrs. Agnew, who died the next month of the broken hip, but they couldn't have stuck to the job any more heroically; and when Homeburg citizens talk about "brave fire-laddies" and "homely heroes" at the annual benefit supper of the Volunteer Company No. 1, they mean Pat and Henry, and are perfectly willing to argue the question with any one.

So we worship our company to our heart's content, and when it comes pacing slowly down the street at the head of every parade, with the members