This matter of primitive sanitation reminds me of an experience. To accommodate an old iron bath-tub that I wished to set up in my Main Street home in the late sixties, I was obliged to select one of the bedrooms; since, when my adobe was built, the idea of having a separate bathroom in a house had never occurred to any owner. I connected it with the _zanja_ at the rear of my lot by means of a wooden conduit; which, although it did not join very closely, answered all purposes for the discharge of waste water. One of my children for several years slept in this combination bath- and bedroom; and although the plumbing was as old-fashioned as it well could be, yet during all that time there was no sickness in our family. It was fortunate indeed that the adobe construction of the fifties rendered houses practically fireproof since, in the absence of a water-system, a bucket-brigade was all there was to fight a fire with, and this rendered but poor service. I remember such a brigade at work, some years after I came, in the vicinity of the Bell Block, when a chain of helpers formed a relay from the nearest _zanja_ to the blazing structure. Buckets were passed briskly along, from person to person, as in the animated scene described by Schiller in the well-known lines of _Das Lied von der Glocke_: _Durch der Hände lange Kette Um die Wette Fliegt der Eimer_;[10] a process which was continued until the fire had exhausted itself. Francis Mellus had a little hand-cart, but for lack of water it was generally useless. Instead of fire-bells announcing to the people that a conflagration was in progress, the discharging of pistols in rapid succession gave the alarm and was the signal for a general fusillade throughout the neighboring streets. Indeed, this method of sounding a fire-alarm was used as late as the eighties. On the breaking out of fires, neighbors and friends rushed to assist the victim in saving what they could of his property. On account of the inadequate facilities for extinguishing anything like a conflagration, it transpired that insurance companies would not for some time accept risks in Los Angeles. If I am not mistaken, S. Lazard obtained the first protection late in the fifties and paid a premium of four per cent. The policy was issued by the Hamburg-Bremen Company, through Adelsdorfer Brothers of San Francisco, who also imported foreign merchandise; and Lazard, thereafter, as the Los Angeles agent for the Hamburg-Bremen Company, was the first insurance underwriter here of whom I have any knowledge. Adelsdorfer Brothers, it is also interesting to note, imported the first Swedish matches brought into California, perhaps having in mind cause and effect with profit at both ends; they put them on the retail market in Los Angeles at twenty-five cents a package.