under the window, and bade them jump, one
by one. They jumped, and were saved. Last of all, he jumped himself,
after a vain effort to save the mother. She was already dead. He
caught her gown, but the body slipped from his grasp and fell crashing
to the street fifty feet below. He himself was hurt in his jump. The
volunteers who held the net looked up, and were frightened; they let
go their grip, and the plucky fireman broke a leg and hurt his back in
the fall.

"Like a cry of fire in the night" appeals to the dullest imagination
with a sense of sudden fear. There have been nights in this city when
the cry swelled into such a clamor of terror and despair as to make
the stoutest heart quake--when it seemed to those who had to do with
putting out fires as if the end of all things was at hand. Such a
night was that of the burning of "Cohnfeld's Folly," in Bleecker
Street, March 17, 1891. The burning of the big store involved the
destruction, wholly or in part, of ten surrounding buildings, and
called out nearly one-third of the city's Fire Department. While the
fire raged as yet unchecked,--while walls were falling with shock and
crash of thunder, the streets full of galloping engines and ambulances
carrying injured firemen, with clangor of urgent gongs; while
insurance patrolmen were being smothered in buildings a block away by
the smoke that hung like a pall over the city,--another disastrous
fire broke out in the dry-goods district, and three alarm-calls came
from West Seventeenth Street. Nine other fires were signalled, and
before morning all the crews that were left were summoned to Allen
Street, where four persons were burned to death in a tenement. Those
are the wild nights that try firemen's souls, and never yet found them
wanting. During the great blizzard, when the streets were impassable
and the system crippled, the fires in the city averaged nine a
day,--forty-five for the five days from March 12 to 16,--and not one
of them got beyond control. The fire commissioners put on record their
pride in the achievement, as well they might. It was something to be
proud of, indeed.

Such a night promised to be the one when the Manhattan Bank and the
State Bank across the street on the other Broadway corner, with three
or four other buildings, were burned, and when the ominous "two nines"
were rung, calling nine-tenths of the whole force below Central Park
to the threatened quarter. But, happily, the promise was not full