At five o'clock to-day--the day set for the Java evening entertainment--I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that, for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members' shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the booths which in all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities," as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink, utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there was, as Mrs. Johnson's _pièce de résistance_, the fire-engine. I had never before been in the engine-house--you know how there will be commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something on the very air, stabbing us with _Halt_ while we count the bell strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help.