Shorty turns redder still. Many a time when he would have been glad to spend an evening at the home of Joy or Beekman, Doremus or Satterlee, Snipe had held back. "You go," he said: "I'll stay here and read," and it wasn't long before Shorty fully understood the reason. Snipe could not bear to go in such shabby attire, but he had no better, and could get none without importuning his mother. No one in the houses of the fire department looked or said critical things about his clothes. Snipe was just as welcome as Shorty, and the rough fellows of the red shirts seemed to enjoy explaining everything about the different styles of engines and all the intricacies of their running rules to the brown-eyed boy, who seemed to ponder over what he was told and to remember everything. And so it had resulted that whenever a cold or rainy Saturday came round and they couldn't play ball, big Damon and little Pythias had spent many an hour going from one engine-or hose-house to another, studying the different "machines," learning to know the foremen or leaders of the rival companies, and often climbing to the tall perches of the bell towers and gazing out through the watcher's long glass over the far-spreading city, the smoky shores of Jersey or Long Island, the thicket of masts bordering the rivers, and the distant glimmering bay. It was all of vivid interest. True, they heard language that was eminently unclassical. They penetrated into sections of the great city where the fashionable garments of their wealthier schoolmates would have become the target for the satire of the saloons and the missiles of the street Arabs. They saw and heard all manner of things at which Aunt Lawrence would have shrunk in dismay, and concerning which Shorty's own people were sometimes apprehensive. But as neither boy cared to imitate the language or the manners thus discovered, it was held that no great harm resulted. That they might have been far better employed every right-thinking moralist will doubtless declare, and that they would have been better employed even Snipe, down in the bottom of his heart, would have admitted--but for his clothes. It is astonishing how much one's garb has to do with one's goodness, even among school-boys.