I slept right through the
performance that night. And once I did see a row of stores burn, back in
Homeburg--at the distance of a mile. I was in school, and the teacher
wouldn't dismiss us. By stretching my neck several feet I could just see
the flames leaping over the trees, but that was all. Some of the bad
boys sneaked out of the door, but I was a good boy, and waited one
thousand years until school was out and the fire was ditto. I've never
felt quite the same since toward either goodness or education.

Some men run faithfully to fires year after year and view a fine
collection of burning beefsteaks and feverish chimneys and volcanic
wood-sheds, while others stroll out after dinner in a strange city and
spend a pleasant evening watching a burning oil-refinery make a Vesuvius
look pale and sickly in comparison. Luck is distributed in a dastardly
way, and as for myself I've quit trying. I don't run to fires at all any
more. The big cities have fooled me long enough by sending out forty
pieces of apparatus to smother a defective flue. I stay behind and
watch the crowd. It's more amusing and not half so much work.

Of course in Homeburg it's different. You city people don't realize what
a blessing the fire-fiend is to a small town. Fires mean a whole lot to
us. They keep us from petrifying altogether during the dull seasons. And
they don't have to be real fires, either. Any old alarm will do. Our
fire-bell sounds just as terrible for a little brush fire as it would
for a flaming powder-mill. It's an adventure merely to hear the thing.
Take a winter night in the dull season after Christmas, for instance.
You have begun to go to sleep right after supper. You've finished the
job at nine o'clock, and by two A.M. you're sailing placidly southwest
of Australia in a seagoing automobile.

Suddenly the pirate-ship in the rear, which you hadn't noticed before,
slips up and begins potting away at you with a dull metallic boom. The
auto slips its clutch, and the engine begins to clang and clatter, and
somebody off behind a red-hot mountain in the distance begins ringing an
enormous bell just as you slide downward into a crater of flame--and
then you wake up entirely, and the fire-bell is going
"clang-clang-clang-clang-clang," while below you hear the ringing crunch
of your neighbor's feet on the cold snow, and outside the north window
there is a red glare which may be either the end of the world or another
exploded lamp in 'Bige