One summer, while in Switzerland, I asked a prominent merchant of Lausanne, when his town had had its last serious fire. "Not in three years," he replied. I was moved to ask this question because I had found the fire apparatus in padlocked barns, or stations, with the keys in the hands of the police, who attended to the fire-fighting; and this seemed, as compared to the remarkably quick methods employed in America, a somewhat dangerous form of fire protection. Lausanne is a town of about fifty thousand population, and I wondered how many American cities of a like size could boast of only one serious fire in three years. Not many, I imagine. In Lucerne, a smaller city of Switzerland, of about forty thousand population, the conditions were practically the same, with the exception that each stable containing the fire apparatus had a notice posted on the door stating that the keys could be found in the neighboring hotels and drug-shops, and the citizens were expected to take out the engines in the event of a fire, while the firemen (volunteers) came on "call," the alarm being sounded on all the church bells. Lucerne is a well-known tourist center, heavily populated during the summer months, and has many large shops filled with very inflammable material, and a great many very old buildings; and yet this place had had only two fires of any size within two years! While I was attending the morning drill of the Central Fire Station at Dresden, in Saxony, the captain in command told me that the city had, on an average, about six alarms of fire a week. I casually remarked that we had twenty-five _a day_ in New York. He looked at me with wonderment and doubt, and when I repeated that we actually had between twenty and thirty alarms of fire a day in the Borough of Manhattan alone, he threw up his hands and exclaimed, "Thank heaven, it is not as bad as that here, or our beautiful city would be destroyed!" And so we find, thanks to superior building construction, less hurry and rush in business methods, and a wholesome regard on the part of the citizens for certain rigid laws covering the use of explosives and materials of all kinds which usually cause fire, the lot of the foreign firefighter is not as strenuous as that of his brother fireman on this side of the water. Because of the excellent character of the buildings abroad fires burn slowly, and rarely extend beyond the room or floor in which they start. Here, on the other hand, the conditions are entirely different. Our fires are larger, more destructive, and more frequent, compelling us to support not only the most effective, but most expensive, fire-departments in the world; and yet, in spite of all this, our annual fire losses are from ten to twenty times more than those of any country in Europe.