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Seventeen-the busiest in the world—in the heart of the Ghetto-dashing to a hundred fires a month. And there the Captain, an ancient fighter of fires, taught us the first steps in his dexterous trade. We learned to catch the brass pole, hand under elbow, until we could slide quickly from floor to floor. We practiced jumping directly from bed into our "turnouts "-trousers rumpled down over the legs of great rubber boots. We learned our stations on engine and hosecart, stacked our helmets on our rubber coats turned inside out, right arm-hole up.

"Effective firemen of the fourth class," chortled the Captain, as we stumbled about. Suddenly there came the terrifying rattle of the gong, and, ready to jump ourselves, we looked for earthquake, or at least expedition. But two of the horses had to be driven with a strap beneath the hanging harness. The men stood carelessly at their places; those who had been napping stretched and yawned. The horses shambled back to their stalls; and the watchman at the desk chuckled to the grins of the company: "That was ten miles away up the Bronx. But keep your eye open for those old sorrels, if she rings in the first two hundreds. They know their own numbers.”

It was in vain we waited. Smoking sociable pipes, we dragged out the evening with yarns. We fooled with the two puppies-few are the dogs that live to age in an engine-house. A girl with a shawled head daintily poked her nose in at the door to see the time. Jimmy Lynch, leader of musical revels, got out his harmonium for "Sweet as the Heather." We took a turn out of doors, and remembered that we were within the Jewish pale. Back we went, and to friendship with "Ikey the Monk," and "Petey," a shuffling veteran of thirty-five years' erranding--these were the "Buffs" of Company Seventeentimid and unavowed camp-followers, who time after time ran to bring us hot coffee and sandwiches from the delicatessen commissariat down the street. Wearily at midnight we turned in, but not to sleep, for our eyes were held open by the excitement of waiting.

A dim light came up the stairs and

through the open transom of the officers' quarters. Gleaming out of the darkness you could see the brass of the four poles for our descent. You could see the burnished gong glowing sullenly against the ceiling. And darkly, as you raised on your elbow, you could see the forms of a dozen men resting heavily on that white line of cots that stretched the length of the low-lying room. They and four thousand others, like garrisoned, were the guards of the sleeping city. Rolling restlessly on our beds, we strove prodigiously to imagine the terrific act to which we might at any moment be summoned. Tense was the expectation of the call; yet the hours dragged on, until we, too, sank into slumber, and slept deeply till a thing happened like a clap of thunder. It was the forward jump of the freed horses. No one spoke. The company as one man thumped into their "turnouts." There was the rush, the swift tumbling fall by the brass poles-man on man-the scramble for places. But the horses, with slow hoofs, were carelessly sidling up to truck and engine, and again we knew that the call was not for us.

The commanding officer for the next night, when we reported for duty, was Lieutenant Sheridan-Sheridan, the exchampion heavy-weight of "de Ate"big, brawny, brutal in work, hard of speech-Sheridan, who will get the fear out of any man who will stay by him for six months, and who roughly hides his good heart and his loyalty as if they were things of shame. It was the beginning of January, but the windows were open, and the monotonous, whining sing-song of "Mazeltov" from a Yiddish barrel-organ drifted into the officers' room on the misty air. And there, as our chair-backs worried into the wall, Sheridan, hoarse from late smoke-swallowing in Peck Slip, in the picturesque staccato of "de Ate" painted us vivid sketches of a heroic and swift-moving life.

He gave us shuddering tragic stories of the great fires of the Hotel Windsor and of the Royal. He plentifully damned the firebug, in the fixed belief of the Department that one-third of all fires are kindled in arson. He pictured native differences in fire-frighted

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- brought not a sound, and we slept the peaceful sleep of a country inn. We had our bread and coffee at an indolent hour, and the boys of Seventeen voted us mascots. When, infected, the nervous strain of waiting came on us too, we at last began to understand the first duty of that life of killing waiting and killing work. It had turned sharply cold in the night. The men were moody and restless, biting hard on their pipes; the horses were stamping irritably. And still there was not a sign of fire among New York's four million people. We fell to speculating on the doctrine of chances. Again we talked of roulette. And again we seemed to wait for the declaring of the next in a series of the ineluctably written procession of numbers. The blackboard bore the past sequence of time and place, and to the newest recruit there seemed a fixed order in these strokes of fire-something that a man could calculate if he had a little more wit. There were those six nights before Christmas when the call rang regularly at 8:55. Last week there were those five successive early morning bells that Keeley-rashest and surest of drivers-loved for his "breakfast gong." And as we talked this folly, the engineer, who was smearing putz-paste over the nickel of his smoke-stack, nodded his head at us: "You hear me! There's an alarm coming now. See if we don't get it within an hour and have a hard afternoon and night of it." It was then 11:38 A.M.

We patted the horses whose backs were woefully spattered with spark-scars; kicked our heels to a warming beside the engine as we listened to the steam bird chirping in the boiler; tramped a dozen times round the spick-and-span order of the equipment. "The Monk" brought us a sandwich, and we were just biting into the gray of the rye bread, when there came the rattling clanging of One Hundred. There was an instant hammering of hoofs, a headlong rushing of men, for which there stands in the memory only a marvelous blur of thunderous sound and of electrically moving bodies. We, too, were caught by the whirlwind-one to the engine, one to the hose-cart.

But with the engine was the wondrous life: "Sheridan and the engineer grappled me and thrust me into my coat. I seized the rubber-wound holding-bar. My legs stiffened as we bounded ahead, furiously rolling over the broken pavement. At first I saw nothing but the great gleaming round of the smoke-stack before me. But when I got into the joy of finding myself a part of the terrific speed, my ears blasted by whistle and bell, I leaned far to the right and caught glimpses of Keeley, like a Roman charioteer, stooping over the pole, his hands far apart, his curving whip flying through the air lashing his plunging horses to a fury of speed. Behind, the hose-cart was lost in the streaming, descending clouds of our steam and smoke. Our speed, with a power of lightning, painted life motionless, and as we tore in the parching cold through the very heart of Jewry, a thousand phantasmagoric pictures flew by us: a patriarch of Israel, posed in a doorway, oblivious of our clangorous race, his pipe smoke hanging still in the air; the white teeth and the smile of a red-cheeked mädchen, fixed like the beauty of a Frans Hals painting; a boy jumping out of our way, poised on the edge of the curb, painfully on one toe, like a weathercock goddess."

And so, rolling uproariously along the littered and ash-strewn streets of the Ghetto, nearly colliding with a trolley, turning three perilous corners, we made our half-mile. The horses were suddenly wheeled and thrown on their haunches, and the engine was shot to its exact place at the hydrant. Before us, but a hundred feet away, our fire was blazing -a shop on the ground floor at the corner of a seven-story tenement. The crackling flames were flying to the third story. The police had already formed their "fire lines" and driven back the swarming, curious Sunday crowd-it was as if we were in the center of a cleared stage in a great theater. While we were rushing forward, with eyes for nothing. but that wind-fanned sheet of flames, in a small fraction of a minute, by some miracle of rapid work unseen by us, the hose was laid. At the order "Stretch in," we seized hold of our great limp pipe and stood from the nozzle numbers

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Three and Five, before and behind Sheridan. As we waited a short second for water, we watched, aye, felt, the growing power and height of the flames; saw the fire leap like a cat to the wooden coping of the shop window next door. Then the hose became rigid as a post with the might of the water; the frosted gray column slapped against the stone portico, there was a prelim inary swish at the blaze without, and Sheridan's hoarse profanity hurled us into the fire. As we drove through the door, to our right lay twisted masses of red-hot iron glowing dully in the smoke. We could see the man before us a foot away on the other side of the hose, but we could see nothing else in the blinding smart and the darkness, and we never knew how the man at the nozzle found the living heart of the fire. Water slopped and spattered everywhere. The heat surged at us scorching. The smoke was intolerable, and we bent down for air. We choked and spluttered and wept. At the last minute of our strength came the prayed-for order to back out. We were dripping, our faces grimed, streaming. The smoke soon cleared. The water was shut off. Axes and picks tore out still steaming woodwork. There was a hasty, careful search for further fire. With the quick order "Take up," the hose was rapidly thrown back, folded into the truck, and back to quarters we rolled, clanging, to answer the next alarm, which might already have sounded.

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tine, they seemed to feel no stirring of the blood in their wonderful feats. But for us were the keen sensations. Always the action of men and horses seemed quicker than our sight. And not our eyes only, but our hands, arms, legs, were leaden dull and heavy-moving. We thought it a marvel that we ever caught engine or truck, and at the next alarm, at 2:52, it was a triumph of observation that one of us dared affirm that he saw the suspended harness drop upon the horses when the driver pulled his reins. Again the engineer touched his flaming oiled torch to the excelsior, the flames roared from the smoke-stack as we boomed over the gutter plank within eleven seconds, and again the earth shook beneath our five tons of vibrant metal as we whirled along Ludlow Street. Sheridan leaned to the driver, croaking his cautions. The rhythmical, plunging flight of the wheels began to get into the head, and the novice knew at last why even the mascot dog of a company "rolls" to a fire. It was a curtain blaze, out before our coming. Yet we dashed up the eight half-flights of stairs, erupted into the singed apartment, and were met with sad Oriental patience and disregard by a half-dozen Russian Jews squatting in the disorder.

COPYRIGHT, 1907, BY DE WITT C. WHEELER THE CHIEF

We arrived at 12:52. The stopped clock marked 12:26. It was unimaginably quick work-the hard work, dulled into habit, of a fast trade. So the men thought it, and, drilled in the swift rou

With a rush we were back to listen, hour after hour, to the gongs clamoring for engines in distant streets of the ever-burning city. And with tempered impatience we idled. We made a strange dinner of grilled liver, bitter pickles, and the unleavened matzoths; and it was not till 8:36 that we were again summoned, and the engineer rejoiced in the honor of a prophet. The horses vaulted over

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