TWO FEATS BY FIRE DRIVERS.

TWO FEATS BY FIRE DRIVERS.

每个人都知道的人处理线over the horses that haul the city’s fire apparatus are splendid drivers, but it is not often that one can get exactly such a demonstration of that fact as this: “Here, says the New York Sun) was an uptown residence street, asphalted, that was just now covered with six inches of soft slushy snow, which was marked with many hoofprints and scored all over, straight and crisscross and zig-zag, with the tracks made by many wagon wheels. Into one block of this street, which was at that moment vacant of all other vehicles, came, booming, a fire engine. People living on the block heaid its whistle as it approached and ran, as they always do, to the windows to see it go by, and enjoyed the stirring little spectacle that it presented as it passed. The three fine big horses were galloping madly, the driver sitting strapped into his perch at the front of the engine, the lines stretched out like ribbons of steel. The smoke, with the speed at which the engine was moving, trailed back flat from the mouth of the burnished smokestack. The captain and the engineer stood in the fuel box back of the boiler, the captain peering round at the side, looking ahead and keeping the whistle going, while live sparks dropped all along from between the furnace bars as the engine flew along. A stirring spectacle, as it always is. But, when the engine had gone, some at least of those who had seen it pass were moved to admiration by something it had left behind it, this being the tracks of its wheels in the soft slushy snow. Having the block all to himself, the driver had driven along plumb and exactly in the crowning middle of it, and he had driven so straight that his wheel tracks were as true as the parallel rails of a railroad track. In fact, the wheel tracks that the engine left suggested at once a railroad track. It was nothing less than wonderful driving that did that; but another wonder was coming. Two seconds after the engine had passed the hose wagon come flying along with its bell clanging, driver cool and easy and some of the men on the wagon casually putting on their rubber coats. Wnen the hose wagon had passed and the people looked for its tracks, to see how well the hose wagon driver had done, they couldn’t find ’em. He hadn’t made any. He had driven the whole length of the block with his wheels running true as a die in the furrows made by the wheels of the fire engine! Fine driver, sure enough, the man on the fire engine, and what do you think of that man on the hose wagon?”

每个人都知道的人处理线over the horses that haul the city’s fire apparatus are splendid drivers, but it is not often that one can get exactly such a demonstration of that fact as this: “Here, says the New York Sun) was an uptown residence street, asphalted, that was just now covered with six inches of soft slushy snow, which was marked with many hoofprints and scored all over, straight and crisscross and zig-zag, with the tracks made by many wagon wheels. Into one block of this street, which was at that moment vacant of all other vehicles, came, booming, a fire engine. People living on the block heaid its whistle as it approached and ran, as they always do, to the windows to see it go by, and enjoyed the stirring little spectacle that it presented as it passed. The three fine big horses were galloping madly, the driver sitting strapped into his perch at the front of the engine, the lines stretched out like ribbons of steel. The smoke, with the speed at which the engine was moving, trailed back flat from the mouth of the burnished smokestack. The captain and the engineer stood in the fuel box back of the boiler, the captain peering round at the side, looking ahead and keeping the whistle going, while live sparks dropped all along from between the furnace bars as the engine flew along. A stirring spectacle, as it always is. But, when the engine had gone, some at least of those who had seen it pass were moved to admiration by something it had left behind it, this being the tracks of its wheels in the soft slushy snow. Having the block all to himself, the driver had driven along plumb and exactly in the crowning middle of it, and he had driven so straight that his wheel tracks were as true as the parallel rails of a railroad track. In fact, the wheel tracks that the engine left suggested at once a railroad track. It was nothing less than wonderful driving that did that; but another wonder was coming. Two seconds after the engine had passed the hose wagon come flying along with its bell clanging, driver cool and easy and some of the men on the wagon casually putting on their rubber coats. Wnen the hose wagon had passed and the people looked for its tracks, to see how well the hose wagon driver had done, they couldn’t find ’em. He hadn’t made any. He had driven the whole length of the block with his wheels running true as a die in the furrows made by the wheels of the fire engine! Fine driver, sure enough, the man on the fire engine, and what do you think of that man on the hose wagon?”