has made New York's Fire Department great
equally animates its commercial brother has been shown more than once,
but never better than at the memorable fire in the Hotel Royal, which
cost so many lives. No account of heroic life-saving at fires, even as
fragmentary as this, could pass by the marvellous feat, or feats, of
Sergeant (now Captain) John R. Vaughan on that February morning six
years ago. The alarm rang in patrol station No. 3 at 3.20 o'clock on
Sunday morning. Sergeant Vaughan, hastening to the fire with his men,
found the whole five-story hotel ablaze from roof to cellar. The fire
had shot up the elevator shaft, round which the stairs ran, and from
the first had made escape impossible. Men and women were jumping and
hanging from windows. One, falling from a great height, came within
an inch of killing the sergeant as he tried to enter the building.
Darting up into the next house, and leaning out of the window with his
whole body, while one of the crew hung on to one leg,--as Fireman
Pearl did to Howe's in the splendid rescue at the Geneva Club,--he
took a half-hitch with the other in some electric-light wires that ran
up the wall, trusting to his rubber boots to protect him from the
current, and made of his body a living bridge for the safe passage
from the last window of the burning hotel of three men and a woman
whom death stared in the face, steadying them as they went with his
free hand. As the last passed over, ladders were being thrown up
against the wall, and what could be done there was done.

Sergeant Vaughan went up on the roof. The smoke was so dense there
that he could see little, but through it he heard a cry for help, and
made out the shape of a man standing upon a window-sill in the fifth
story, overlooking the courtyard of the hotel. The yard was between
them. Bidding his men follow,--they were five, all told,--he ran down
and around in the next street to the roof of the house that formed an
angle with the hotel wing. There stood the man below him, only a jump
away, but a jump which no mortal might take and live. His face and
hands were black with smoke. Vaughan, looking down, thought him a
negro. He was perfectly calm.

"It is no use," he said, glancing up. "Don't try. You can't do it."

The sergeant looked wistfully about him. Not a stick or a piece of
rope was in sight. Every shred was used below. There was absolutely
nothing. "But I couldn't let him," he said to me, months after, when