These stations, or, as they are well named, _casernes_ (barracks), are big structures filled with many firemen, on an average about 140 men in every building; and each station is equipped with numerous pieces of fire apparatus, and all are provided with a large inner court, or drill-yard, in which the men go through military evolutions twice daily, and where the new men, who are coming into the brigade continually, are taught how to handle all the various appliances used in fire-fighting. Here also the men are put through a series of calisthenic exercises two or three times a week, which, if introduced into the American fire-departments, would drive every man out of the service, so vigorous are these "stunts." In acrobatic fashion the Paris firemen are compelled to climb ropes, jump hurdles, balance themselves in mid-air on frail wooden supports, perform on horizontal bars, execute a kind of "setting-up" drill en masse, and last, but not least, climb up one of the walls of the courtyard, holding on by their finger-tips and the edges of their boots to little crevices in the wall, and falling, if they should slip, into a pile of sand at the bottom. In addition to all this they have the regulation hose, ladder, and life-saving drills of all other fire-departments. The Paris fire stations are thoroughly up to date in equipment, for we find them fitted with sliding-poles, swinging-harness, horses kept in box-stalls within a pole's-length of the harness, automatic door-openers, and virtually every quick-hitching device for which American fire-departments are noted. And in addition to steam fire-engines, aërial ladder-trucks, and hose-wagons--the latter very much of the same type as those used in this country--there are a great many automobile fire-engines in service, and quite a few of the _casernes_, or stations, are equipped entirely with motor-driven apparatus. There are also several electric fire-engines in use, practical-looking affairs, carrying a large square tank containing four hundred gallons of water, which is given the necessary pressure to reach the top of any of the buildings by means of an ingenious set of electric pumps placed at the back of the tank. As it only requires a few men to handle this engine, and the mere throwing over of a lever to get it under way, it is used at many small fires, and is sometimes the first and only piece of apparatus to leave a station in answer to an alarm, for there is no regular "assignment" of engines and ladder-trucks sent to the alarm-boxes in Paris, as is the case in our cities, and the operation of their fire-alarm system differs from that of any other city in the world.