y, and are perfectly willing to argue the question with any one.

So we worship our company to our heart's content, and when it comes
pacing slowly down the street at the head of every parade, with the
members looking handsomer than chorus girls in their dark-blue flannel
suits, red belts, and neat blue caps, we look at them full of pride and
confidence. Our little boys dream of the time when they will grow up and
join the company and wear seven-pound red helmets at fires, and come
home tired and muddy in the gray dawn after a fire and demand hot coffee
from their admiring women-folks; and as for the Homeburg girls--well,
the greatest social function of our town, or of the county for that
matter, is the annual ball of the Homeburg fire department.

And let me tell you, when the nine-piece orchestra--all home
talent--strikes up the grand march and Chief Dobbs, with his wide-gauge
mustache and vacuum-cleaned uniform, leads the company around the hall,
every hero with the girl or wife of his heart on his arm and a full
hundred couples of the mere laymen crowding in behind, in a long and
many-looped line, the Astor ball would have to do business with a brass
band and a display of fireworks to attract any more enthusiasm.

That's what the fire department means to us in Homeburg. We don't suffer
half so much from fires as we would from the lack of them; and when this
new concrete construction makes the world fire-proof, and the Homeburg
fire department rusts away and disappears, we will mourn it even more
sincerely than we did the opera house with a real gallery, which got
over-heated one night twenty-five years ago and burned, compelling us to
get along with a mere hall with a flat floor ever afterward.

III

HOMEBURG'S TWO FOUR-HUNDREDTHS

_The Struggles of our Best Families to Impress Us_

Hold on, Jim. Don't hurry so. Remember I don't have a chance to walk up
Fifth Avenue every day. Give me a chance to astonish myself. Here are
ten thousand women going by in clothes that would make a lily turn red
and burn up with shame, and an equal number of proud gents with curlycue
collars on their overcoats, and I want to do the sight justice.

You see all this parade every day, but I don't, and I want to drink it
all in. See that feminine explosion in salmon plush! That would
paralyze business back home. Watch that hat crossing the street--it
ought to be arrested for being without visible means of support--Oh, I
see!