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
Henr