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and coatless, he scrambled to the slippery footboard. Carelessly he watched a terrific race with another engine, and, unmoved, saw his dashing Seventeen win first honors of arrival at the fire. Half-dazed, with unblinking eyes, he peered at the cheerful burning of a store and basement lace factory. Plate glass was rattling on the sidewalk; there was the burst and crash of a rammed door. Mechanically, he knew not how, he became a part of the rush into the stifling cloud of smoke, Sheridan, with his set face, again barking his orders with a curse. There was blind staggering, struggling, swaying, man loyally touching man. Life grew weak and the fire strong. He seemed in the presence of the Arch Fear of "Prospice." Hot, there was the fog in the throat and the mist in the face. A kind of sweetness fell upon him, and he knew no more until, lying on the sidewalk, there came the after pain, the racking head, the aching of throat and limbs.

Yet all this was skirmish fighting and nothing more. But within a week we saw in tremendous battle the slow defeat of the Department and the utter destruction of a thirteen-story "fireproof" building. A sullen fire on the fifth floor had burned hotly for three hours in the early night. Alarm after alarm was turned in; twenty engines were pumping, and still the fire gained. Then of a sudden the windows of the sixth floor shone red. They quickly crocked from brown to black, and were not seen again till vivid cracks of light seamed the glass, which bulged for a second, and then, shattered by the heat, fell with a jingling crash on the pavement below. ously the flames curled round the casements, and through the denser smoke only a newer and a higher line of volleying flames told of the doom of another floor. Another excited hour and the victorious fire, in sheets, torn and lambentribboned, had reached the wide eaves.

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It was danger so magnificently staged that it was the rarest of spectacles, gorgeous in flaring reds. Dyed in the lurid Dyed in the lurid light, the smoke floated in cumulus clouds, or drifted raggedly. Shot with golden falling stars, it trailed over the barred silver of the searchlight. Three

white towers of steel spouted gigantically, and the water streamed upon the glowing walls. There were streams parallel, shooting out straight from another beetling cliff of brick. There were streams playing at a dozen angles, streaked across the smoke. They spat and hissed on the walls. They curved and sprayed like wonderful plumes, and threw clouds of shining mist into the flames. They were silver, they were dark gray; they glittered with gold.

Engines with piercing whistles call for coal, and the battle is loud in the streets. A fifth alarm has sounded, and every hydrant within the radius of a half-mile is in use. The great La France engines are vehemently humming; the small Notts are shaking themselves frantic to raise the water an extra foot. But not a gallon is thrown above the eighth floor. The oldest of the throbbing hose is weakened by the enormous pressure and bursts, until the streets are filled with giant fans of water. The towers begin to dribble ineffectively, and stream after stream feebly falls to earth. Drenched groups of men, shining in black rubber coats and helmets, are heavily toiling at the pipes; yet not an inch is gained. Hook and ladder trucks and-water towers shift positions. An abandoned engine under the blazing cornice of the pile is boldly dragged away in retreat by six of the men. The white-coated and redhelmeted salvage corps hurry by. A rumor goes that four men are caught on the only corner of the roof that is not yet ablaze. Ten minutes more and the reporters crowd questioning around the rescuer, Hery, of Company Three, who shot the life-line to the roof from the dome of the "Florence." Suddenly, appalling in terror, there is a mighty quaking roar. Heavy quintuple presses and a group of safes have plunged from roof to sub-cellar, and the certain question is asked, "How many were killed?" Cylinders of benzine explode like salvos of artillery. There is the dull boom of a back-draught, and the deafening fall of brick.

The men begin to fall back; the very last of them leave the building. But an instant before the flames, descending, seize the lower floors, there is a sudden

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an hour they have hung unnoticed and helpless, clinging like monkeys to the narrow mesh of the steel. Doctors with their black bags, in overcoats and white trousers, hurry about, and many wounded are carried away. In the very midst of the battle, company by company, a roll

call is taken, and the missing are known It was the first fifth-alarm fire in a high, by name.

The great Parker Building burned to a skeleton of walis, and the Department went down to a heavy defeat. Our own Seventeen, in the very front of the fight, lost in everything but life. Three men were killed that night and forty were taken to the hospital. It was near morning when the battle was over, and a little procession, rubber-clad and helmeted, with pikes and swinging lanterns, entered the great columned doorway to find the men that were lost. Seven times they struggled up three flights of stairs, only to return defeated by the smoke, the killing heat and thudding bricks. Nor did they succeed for three days. And soon again the roll of death was to grow. Within another month three more brave fellows died at fires-the lion-hearted Deputy Chief, Kruger, miserably drowned in a sub-cellar.

The flaming wonders of that night were in part the woeful gift of political graft or incompetence. Yet rotten hose but masked the fact of a worse defeat.

"proof" building. It was a severe trial and failure of the cleverest weapons that our science has given for the fight with the fearful living spirit of our universe of inert matter, for before this Destroyer our best, as well as our worst, in engine and hose was powerless, and New York thought of the fate of Baltimore and San Francisco. For the moment it seemed a cureless impotence in our new and proud civilization, and man still the idle sport of these monstrous, shambling, brute-like gods of the elements-these spirits of the original chaos, capricious, all-powerful, and cruelly delighting in their strength.

But Cleary; our "bunkie," heartbroken, coughing the smoke out of his lungs as he dragged on an overcoat, had a valid theory of defeat: "It takes the Chief," he spluttered. "If he'd 'a' been here, he'd 'a' been lightin' his cigar by now with that grin o' his, and O'Connor and Phillips 'ud be doin' easy 'sentry go' on Turkish rugs instead o' lyin' dead in that cellar!"

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"TO A TRUE LANDSCAPE GARDENER FLOWERS, SHRUBS, TREES AND SHAVEN LAWNS ARE... PIGMENTS, MASSES OF LIGHT AND SHADE, TEXTURES, SURFACES, WITH WHICH HE COMPOSES HIS OUTDOOR PICTURES"

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