If it is anything, it is that--up there--I am
boss. The rest are not in it. Only I wish," he added, rubbing his arm
ruefully at the recollection, "that she hadn't fainted. It's hard when
they faint. They're just so much dead-weight. We get no help at all
from them heavy women."

And that was all I could get out of him. I never had much better luck
with Chief Benjamin A. Gicquel, who is the oldest wearer of the
Bennett medal, just as Coleman is the youngest, or the one who
received it last. He was willing enough to talk about the science of
putting out fires; of Department Chief Bonner, the "man of few words,"
who, he thinks, has mastered the art beyond any man living; of the
back-draught, and almost anything else pertaining to the business: but
when I insisted upon his telling me the story of the rescue of the
Schaefer family of five from a burning tenement down in Cherry Street,
in which he earned his rank and reward, he laughed a good-humored
little laugh, and said that it was "the old man"--meaning
Schaefer--who should have had the medal. "It was a grand thing in him
to let the little ones come out first." I have sometimes wished that
firemen were not so modest. It would be much easier, if not so
satisfactory, to record their gallant deeds. But I am not sure that it
is, after all, modesty so much as a wholly different point of view. It
is business with them, the work of their lives. The one feeling that
is allowed to rise beyond this is the feeling of exultation in the
face of peril conquered by courage, which Coleman expressed. On the
ladder he was boss! It was the fancy of a masterful man, and none but
a masterful man would have got upon the ladder at all.

Doubtless there is something in the spectacular side of it that
attracts. It would be strange if there were not. There is everything
in a fireman's existence to encourage it. Day and night he leads a
kind of hair-trigger life, that feeds naturally upon excitement, even
if only as a relief from the irksome idling in quarters. Try as they
may to give him enough to do there, the time hangs heavily upon his
hands, keyed up as he is, and need be, to adventurous deeds at
shortest notice. He falls to grumbling and quarrelling, and the
necessity becomes imperative of holding him to the strictest
discipline, under which he chafes impatiently. "They nag like a lot of
old women," said Department Chief Bonner to me once; "and the best at
a fire are often the worst in the