which we enjoyed long
before Edison took out his patent. Do you wonder that it makes me sad to
see so many perfectly good trains going to waste in this roofed-over
township of yours? Take me out of it, please.

II

THE FRIENDLY FIRE-FIEND

_The Joys of Fighting Him with a Volunteer Fire Department_

Hello! Here comes the fire department! Watch the people swarm! Uumpp!
Ouch! Excuse me for living. This is no place for a peaceable spectator.
I'm going to cast anchor in this doorway until the mob gets past.

No, thank you. I'll not join the Marathon. But you don't know how
homesick and happy it makes me to see this crowd run! I've been in New
York a week now, and honestly this is almost the first really human
impulse I've seen a citizen give way to. Until this minute I've felt as
if I were a hundred thousand miles from Homeburg, with all train
service suspended for the winter. If I could find the man who stepped on
my heels while chasing that engine, I'd thank him and ask him what
volunteer fire department he used to run with. See 'em scramble.

Whoop! Here comes the hook-and-ladder truck! This is nothing but
Homeburg on a big scale. I'm beginning to envy you city chaps now. That
makes the fourth engine that's come past. You get more for your money
than we do. Look at that chief hurdling curbstones in his little red
wagon. If Homeburg ever gets big enough to have a chief's wagon, I'll
suffocate with pride.

I see it's the same old story. Fire's all out. It always is by the time
you've run nine blocks. Watch the racers coming back. Stung, every one
of them--gold-bricked. There's a fat fellow who's run half a mile, I'll
bet. If his tongue hung out any farther, he'd trip up on it. But he'll
do it again next time. They all do. Learning to stop running to fires is
as hard as learning to stop buying mining-stock in the West. And it's
just as big a swindle too. The returns from running to fires are
marvelously small. They tell me that a hundred million dollars a year
goes up in flames in this country. I don't believe it. If it does, I
want to know who gets to see all the fun. I don't.

I've run to fires all my life, until lately, and I've drawn about three
hundred and seventy-five blanks. Once I almost saw a big grain-elevator
burn in a Western town. That is, I would have seen it, if I had looked
out of my hotel window. But I'd run two miles to see a burning haystack
in the afternoon, and I was so dead tired that