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 Henry, and are perfectly willing to argue the question with any one. So we worship our company to our heart's content, and when it comes pacing slowly down the street at the head of every parade, with the members looking handsomer than chorus girls in their dark-blue flannel suits, red belts, and neat blue caps, we look at them full of pride and confidence. Our little boys dream of the time when they will grow up and join the company and wear seven-pound red helmets at fires, and come home tired and muddy in the gray dawn after a fire and demand hot coffee from their admiring women-folks; and as for the Homeburg girls--well, the greatest social function of our town, or of the county for that matter, is the annual ball of the Homeburg fire department. And let me tell you, when the nine-piece orchestra--all home talent--strikes up the grand march and Chief Dobbs, with his wide-gauge mustache and vacuum-cleaned uniform, leads the company around the hall, every hero with the girl or wife of his heart on his arm and a full hundred couples of the mere laymen crowding in behind, in a long and many-looped line, the Astor ball would have to do business with a brass band and a display of fireworks to attract any more enthusiasm.