. Upon the paths so made the engines
make straight for the railroad tracks when called out, and follow
these to the fire.

A cold snap inevitably brings a "run" of fires in its train. Stoves
are urged to do their utmost all day, and heaped full of coal to keep
overnight. The fire finds at last the weak point in the flue, and
mischief is abroad. Then it is that the firemen are put upon their
mettle, and then it is, too, that they show of what stuff they are
made. In none of the three big blizzards within the memory of us all
did any fire "get away" from them. During the storm of 1888, when the
streets were nearly impassable for three whole days, they were called
out to fight forty-five fires, any one of which might have threatened
the city had it been allowed to get beyond control; but they smothered
them all within the walls where they started. It was the same in the
bad winter I spoke of. In one blizzard the men of Truck 7 got only
four hours' sleep in four days. When they were not putting out fires
they were compelled to turn in and shovel snow to help the paralyzed
Street-Cleaning Department clear the way for their trucks. Their
plight was virtually that of all the rest.

What Colonel Roosevelt said of his Rough Riders after the fight in the
trenches before Santiago, that it is the test of men's nerve to have
them roused up at three o'clock in the morning, hungry and cold, to
fight an enemy attacking in the dark, and then have them all run the
same way,--forward,--is true of the firemen as well, and, like the
Rough Riders, they never failed when the test came. The firemen going
to the front at the tap of the bell, no less surely to grapple with
lurking death than the men who faced Mauser bullets, but with none of
the incidents of glorious war, the flag, the hurrah, and all the
things that fire a soldier's heart, to urge them on,--clinging, half
naked, with numb fingers to the ladders as best they can while trying
to put on their stiff and frozen garments,--is one of the sights that
make one proud of being a man. To see them in action, dripping icicles
from helmet and coat, high upon the ladder, perhaps incased in solid
ice and frozen to the rungs, yet holding the stream as steady to its
work as if the spray from the nozzle did not fall upon them in showers
of stinging hail, is very apt to make a man devoutly thankful that it
is not his lot to fight fires in winter. It is only a few winters
since, at the burning of