of more
daring feats, more hairbreadth escapes, and more brilliant work, than
could well be recorded between the covers of this book.

Indeed, it is hard, in recording any, to make a choice and to avoid
giving the impression that recklessness is a chief quality in the
fireman's make-up. That would not be true. His life is too full of
real peril for him to expose it recklessly--that is to say,
needlessly. From the time when he leaves his quarters in answer to an
alarm until he returns, he takes a risk that may at any moment set him
face to face with death in its most cruel form. He needs nothing so
much as a clear head; and nothing is prized so highly, nothing puts
him so surely in the line of promotion; for as he advances in rank and
responsibility, the lives of others, as well as his own, come to
depend on his judgment. The act of conspicuous daring which the world
applauds is oftenest to the fireman a matter of simple duty that had
to be done in that way because there was no other. Nor is it always,
or even usually, the hardest duty, as he sees it. It came easy to him
because he is an athlete, trained to do just such things, and because
once for all it is easier to risk one's life in the open, in the sight
of one's fellows, than to face death alone, caught like a rat in a
trap. That is the real peril which he knows too well; but of that the
public hears only when he has fought his last fight, and lost.

How literally our every-day security--of which we think, if we think
of it at all, as a mere matter of course--is built upon the supreme
sacrifice of these devoted men, we realize at long intervals, when a
disaster occurs such as the one in which Chief Bresnan and Foreman
Rooney[3] lost their lives three years ago. They were crushed to
death under the great water-tank in a Twenty-fourth Street factory
that was on fire. Its supports had been burned away. An examination
that was then made of the water-tanks in the city discovered eight
thousand that were either wholly unsupported, except by the
roof-beams, or propped on timbers, and therefore a direct menace, not
only to the firemen when they were called there, but daily to those
living under them. It is not pleasant to add that the department's
just demand for a law that should compel landlords either to build
tanks on the wall or on iron supports has not been heeded yet; but
that is, unhappily, an old story.

[Footnote 3: Rooney wore the Bennett