THE FIREMAN
I
WHEREIN WE SEE A SLEEPING VILLAGE SWEPT BY A RIVER OF FIRE AND THE BURNING OF A FAMOUS HOTEL
I WILL first tell a story, fresh in my memory, about a New Jersey village lost in the hills back of Lake Hopatcong, a charming, sleepy little village that reaches along a stream fringed with butterball-trees and looks contentedly out of its valley up the steep wooded hill that rises before it. Nobody in Glen Gardner cares much what there is in the world beyond that hill.
The general attitude of Glen Gardner toward progress is shown well enough by this, that the village could never see the use of a fire department. They never had one, and never proposed to; other people's houses might get on fire; theirs never did. As a matter of fact, nobody could remember when there had been a fire in Glen Gardner, unless it was Aunt Ann Fritts, who was eighty-eight years old, and remembered back farther than was necessary.
