The fireman on duty for the night, immediately opens the gate, and receives the intelligence, cutting short all loquacity as much as possible, and eliciting the spot where the fire has broken out, and the extent to which it was raging when the person left. The fireman then runs to a bell-handle, which he pulls; and applying his ear to the mouth-piece of a pipe, hears a voice ask, ‘What is it?’ (The fireman hears his own voice sound as if at a great distance; while the voice actually remote sounds close in the mouth-piece, with a strange preternatural effect.) The bell-wire reaches up to the Superintendent’s bedside; and the bell being rung, Mr. Braidwood raises himself on one elbow, and applying his mouth to the other end of the tube, answers, and gives orders. A few words of dialogue conducted in this way, suffice. Up jumps Mr. Braidwood—crosses the passage to his dressing-room (armoury, we ought rather to call it), and in three minutes is attired in the thick cloth frock-coat, boots, and helmet of the Fire Brigade, fixing buttons and straps as he descends the stairs. Meanwhile all the men have been equally active below. No sooner has the fireman aroused Mr. Braidwood, than he rings the bell of the foreman, the engineer, and the ‘singlemen’s bell’—which means the bell of the division where the four unmarried men sleep. He then runs out to the stables, calling the ‘charioteer’ by the way, and two other firemen lodging close by; after which he returns to assist in harnessing the horses. Owing to this simultaneous action, each according to his special and general duties, by the time Mr. Braidwood reaches the bottom of the stairs, the engine has been got out, and put in working order. All its usual furniture, implements, and tools are placed within, or packed about it. Short scaling-ladders, made to fit into each other, are attached to the sides; six lengths of hose; branch-pipes, director-pipes, spare nozzle, suction-pipes, goose-neck, dogs’-tails (the first to deliver water into the engine; the second are iron wrenches), canvas sheet, with rope handles round the edge (to catch people who will boldly jump out of window), dam-board (to prevent water from plug flowing madly away), portable cistern, strips of sheep-skin (to mend bursting hose), balls of cord, flat hose, escape-chain, escape-ropes, mattock, saw, shovel, pole-axe, boat-hook, crow-bar (_such_ a fellow!) to burst through doors or walls, or break up pavement; instruments for opening fire-plugs, and keys for turning stop-cocks of water-mains, &c.