other men, and sharing their nature in its entirety, made the same fight that comes to all men who arrive at moral consciousness.

In that critical hour the Christ knew himself and came to the knowledge of his humanity. The deep peace of childhood, born of innocence and unbroken by the tumult of the awakening senses, had passed with the years which it made beautiful. The dreams of youth, touched with we know not what beauty of heavenly visions rising out of the depths of a pure nature, had gone the way of dreams when the morning breaks. Day had come, and the solitary man, driven into the desert by the sense of marvelous experiences awaiting him, saw himself. He knew his mortality, and out of that knowledge came his first temptation. The long fasting was followed by a great hunger, and he became aware, as every man does, of his weakness. The common needs were his; the needs which press upon all who are born men; the needs which wring men's hearts and try their souls and test their wills as by fire. It is hunger which drives men into the arms of the tempter, and makes the drama in the desert so often a heartbreaking tragedy.

There is the hunger of the body which makes men insane and, if too long denied, sends them to death; the hunger which makes men base, dishonest, impure. And there is also the hunger of the spirit; the crying out of the nature for power, wealth, rank, fame; that passion of desire for which men sell themselves in a vain hope of satisfying the craving that consumes them. The first fact that stands out in a man's consciousness when he faces himself is his mortality and the weaknesses that inhere in it. And the inevitable temptation that waits on that experience, as it waited on the Christ coming to knowledge of himself, is as real, as momentous, as decisive as it is sudden. In that lonely hour when a man makes acquaintance with himself the tempter is always at hand. “Why

hunger," he says, "when there is bread for the asking? Take, eat, and be filled, for they that hunger have a right to be fed."

For the man who says, "The world

owes me a living," there are a thousand who cry out that because they are hungry they have a right to be fed; that to feel a great need is to be justified in satisfying it. This is the temptation that waits under a thousand guises upon the awakening out of childhood and youth to a consciousness of the powers and passions and needs of manhood, and womanhood; at the gate of dawning life stands the tempter whispering, in answer to the passionate craving of the body or the mind, "Command that these stones be made bread." In an immortal phrase Christ gave one of those great answers that penetrate to the very heart of life and throw light on its deepest experiences : "Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God." To use power for selfish purposes, to put a low in place of a high thing, to feed the sense and starve the soul, to change the bread of life into the food of death-that is the temptation which meets every man on the threshold of his career.

The Spectator

In the Irish epic of Cuchulain there is this description of Emer: "When she

walked, it was with a step that was stately and even like the walk of a queen." After witnessing a New Orleans Carnival the Spectator found himself marveling at the persistence of the dream of king and queenship that finds its place in every soil. The ballad writers drop in our ear the refrain, "Where are the snows of yesteryear?" The lovers of mediævalism lament the beauty and quaint pageantry that they deem perished from the earth, but neither count the value of the descendants of the oldtime snows or pageants.

As the Spectator sat on one of the club balconies Mardi Gras night, he was bewildered by the sense of the relationship-ancient and modern. Behind him rose a solid tier of women in ball gowns, the waving of fluffy feathers, the glitter of jewels. Down the roped-off central space in the street was the kaleidoscopic crowd, ebbing and flowing, or eddying

around some strikingly costumed "street masquer." A baby dressed in a pinkand-green domino and peaked cap had dropped off to sleep in his mother's arms. He was not yet bound by the fear of missing something. Next to the mother, whose high cheek-bones and far-apart eyes belonged to a certain type from the French Quarter, stood an old darky "praline woman," her head wrapped in an imposing bandanna turban, capped

with a black sailor hat. Behind them a long string of young men with arms on each other's shoulders were doing the serpentine through the crowd. In and out, under foot, under ropes, under the clutching fingers of policemen, dodged the omnipresent small boy of all crowds, prospecting for the first glimpse of the parade. A glare of red fire, a platoon of torches, a brass band, and the float bearing Comus lumbered past, a towering structure splendid with ingenuity and gilt.

Comus pledged the crowd on the balcony in his wine-cup; his followers flung strings of beads and trinkets. The old game of incognito, which has been played. with the greatest zest by all peoples and ages, was in progress. Was that masquer on the float dancing a special step dance for the pink-satined débutante at front of the balcony? Did he aim at her when he threw the small box? His pantomime invitation to dance at the Opera-House was unmistakable. Who was it that was thus singling her out for favors? In the olden times it was the men who wore the ladies' favors in their helmets while they rode at each other with their lances in rest. In a little while these two would be dancing at the French Opera-House, with a background of brilliant stage scenery, and he would be giving her his bracelets and chains of brass sequins and his spangled mantle, and perhaps a special present of a real jewel. Was he in love with her? That did not follow, but the spirit of romance was hovering over their heads, no more broken-winged than in the days of Arthur and Launcelot. But the difference was that this was a sham? Oh, no. Some in the crowd at tournaments half closed their eyes and

said, "What may all this be about ?" and answered, "Hollow, hollow all delight!"

What if a certain mask did conceal who would presently call out his subthe gray mustache of a prominent banker, stantially proportioned wife for the first dance, and for the second his eldest daughter, who was not certain of an equal degree of consideration from the younger men? What if another mask did conceal the vapid face of a "dancing Tad"? There was some spirit which lay behind them both--a strong spirit

to draw them into all this trouble and expense. Expense! There was the change. Time has substituted another commercial value than the expense of life-blood. Next float! The title“Gods and Goddesses." Then a bewildering succession of pagan deitiesFlora poised among giant morningglories, with butterflies waving before her a homage of sparkling wings; Osiris enthroned among Egyptian symbols-a dream of a moment, an ephemeral display-a tradition preserved.

The next step in the pageant is when the floats lumber into Frenchtown, their colored fire illuminating the lacy ironwork balconies thronged with people. The tired performers disembark by gangplank, the crowd sees them into the French Opera-House and disperses. From then on it is a society event.

The Queen, surrounded by maids, appears in her box. Some one behind the Spectator said, "Why are they all willing to make monkeys of themselves?" To a certain extent there is justice in that question, but is not the love of outward, visible sign of strength, power, beauty, one which is ingrained in our natures? What if she is only a popular débutante, elevated more for her family's power and prominence than for her own? For to-night at least she has become one with Emer and the rest, in the effort to embody in charm and graciousness that walk "which is stately and even like the walk of a queen."

I

N London the brass-helmeted crews of the fire-trucks, with their hoarse shouts, chorused and broken, are the wonder of the jeering American. They are rarely seen, for careful building has a general reward of safety; and the scars of fire are imperceptible in that squat town of sooted walls. On the boulevards of Paris, once you have seen them, you will never forget the splendid dash of the pompiers or the piping toot of their toy trumpets. Yet you bear away no memories of blackened ruins, and no destructive fires ever add their illumination to that World of Light. But New York is a city forever burning. Thirty times and more a day there is a clamorous ringing of gongs, clanging from the Battery to the furthest corner of the Bronx, and thirty times and more a day, in a miracle of speed, four engines are hurled thundering forth in their heavy rolling flight of wheels to the flashing call of fire. Within the Greater City eight million dollars' worth of property are annually devoured by the flames, and the ever-present peril is signed on the city's streets.

High in the sandstone tower of Headquarters, in a quiet room, there are deli

cate disked machines in plate-glass cases, ponderous tickers with broad sheets, hundreds of banked annunciators, cabinets of walnut and brass. Three clerks sit silently waiting for the rattling of buzzer, for hither stretch some three thousand miles of wire, netted over the streets of the five boroughs, expectant, like the nerves of a giant body, to signal the pain of fire to this office-brain of the Fire Alarm Telegraph. A heavy official air broods in the place. Our guide droned his explanations of the intricate machines, but we were bored by his marvels until there came the electric hiss of the buzzer, and we were abandoned. Silently and with magical swiftness for ten seconds the three clerks were a part of the machines. FourSeven-Eight had dropped in the tiny window of an annunciator. A wheel of brass, notched to the number of the alarm, was snapped to its place on a waiting axle. A lever was touched; twice it was set on its flying journey, and twice the alarm rang in the hundred station-houses of the city. It was flashed into another machine in repeated signal. Twice, and by two clerks, was the number verified on the ticker. A map was

from coal trucks and ambulances to searchlights and police. Every company knows its assigned movement for every possible fire. From first to fifth alarm they dash like electric automatons. "Double nine" alone, signal of greatest danger, is a special order from the Chief for selected reinforcements from the whole Department. On a third alarm picked detachments from outlying districts advance within the battle area, and reserves go forward uncalled and "locate" in the empty houses of the engines on duty. For all, except the last tactics of battle, there is the complete dominance of this all-wise, invisible commander.

A second fire blazed for our instruction, and again we saw the swift setting of the signals, and the crude mathematical picturing of the scene. It took time to master details, and the buzzer clattered for a third, a fourth, a fifth fire. The weird mechanism of discs and wires and markers seemed to move at the touch of Fate itself, a power relentlessly decreeing the repetition in small-changing totals of the annual statistics of destruction. Down in the streets the roar of the engine lives for but a moment in the tumultuous flowing of the life of the city. High up here the record grows determinately till you become fatalist. With astonishing precision, year follows year in the assigned causes of fire. "Carelessness with matches" always leads by the inevitable percentage, and so in sequence: "Children playing with fire," and "Cigar and cigarette ends falling through gratings." So, too, Jewish Sabbath lights, and Italian tapers carelessly burning under Saints and Madonnas, kindle their calculable yearly tale of horrors. And, by some iron decree, the average annual loss for each fire mounts unfailingly to $680, and varies but $1.50 in two years. And then there is that persistent daily mean of thirty alarms. As you watch the numbers click to their calls, you may think to see the hours playing for victims a ghastly red-and-black of their own-a roulette of demons.

More nourishing than this is the spell of the life of human valor and skill that, in spite of grafting politicians, makes New York's fire losses a small casualty of battle. And we were to see Chief

Croker, who holds the whole Department at the touch of buttons; who rose from the ranks, sleeps in an engine-house, and does his hours of duty like a fourthclass fireman. Sleek, immaculate in a blue uniform, he swung round to us from his broad, shining mahogany desk. We saw such character as you can discover in a clear, quick-moving gray eye, a heavy assertive jaw, a stalwart body of alertly living muscle. Never at a loss for a fact, he affably multiplied our small knowledge. Yet he would tell no stories, and our hopes of heroic tales were extinguished by the cold-water dash of his "business" view.

"If we do quick work in answering alarms," he said, "it's because we own the streets. Our engines have right of way over everything except the United States mail, and we rammed one of their wagons the other day." And his teeth chopped off a cigar end with something of the power of a steam cutter.

At a great fire his quick, strutting step, the backward tilt of his head, somehow express tremendous physical strength. He is the center of movement, discharging orders in volleys, quick leader and rough master, fearless as if he knew fire for a coward enemy. He is as unsparing of others as of himself, and the rigor of that fairness is capable of terrible exactions. It was at a desperate East Side fire that a dozen firemen were dragged from a cellar insensible. The police were hurrying them to ambulances in a side street, when Croker descended upon them in fury and with oaths. He howled out his rule: "They are my men. I know when they are finished. Leave them alone. I need them here." He splashed water in their faces, and, when they floundered to their feet again, ran them back to the blazing building. "Hard?" a fireman echoed at us. "Yes! But you've got to be hard! You've got to be willing to spend every life in a company if you're to kill out fires in this town. That's the way of the Department!" And we were soon to see for ourselves.

"

With the city formally released from claims for injury, we became as new recruits under orders, and took up our quarters with Engine Company Number