An intelligent juror. "You must have passed a large number of people in the streets between eleven and one o'clock. Did you see no one whom you knew?"
"No one; but at a corner some distance from here,--I could not say what corner,--I noticed a policeman sitting on a barrel in front of a grocery, smoking. He was a short, fat man, and his legs hardly reached to the pavement. I remember him the more particularly, because I stopped and lighted a cigar at his pipe. Just at that moment, the City Hall bell commenced striking a fire alarm."
"What was the district?" asked the juror who was assistant foreman of the Bully Boy Hose.
"The Seventh. I counted the strokes. I walked on rapidly, and soon came up with another policeman, who was leaning against a grocery store. I said to him, 'A cold night, Mr. Policeman,' and I think he would remember that circumstance, if he could be found. Just after I had passed him, the alarm bells struck the last round. Three or four rounds had been struck."
The assistant foreman of the Bully Boy Hose, having referred to a memorandum book which he drew from a breast pocket, here exclaimed:
"The alarm was at twenty-five minutes of twelve. Nothing but a chimney in Whitehall street. We run into Twenty's fellers, comin' back, and had a nice little row. Ever belong to the department, sir?"
Marcus answered "No;" and the pyrophilist looked compassionately upon him, as upon one who had never known true happiness.
"If you never run with the mersheen," observed the coroner, "you do' 'no' wot life is. As for me, sir, it's my boast and pride that I have been a member of the New York Fire Department for more'n twenty years. It wos the backin' of the boys that made me a coroner; and, thank God! I'm never ashamed to tell 'em so."
The coroner spoke truly. So far from being ashamed to "tell 'em so," he was always "telling 'em so," never missing an opportunity, at political meetings, to inform the firemen that he was "one of 'em," and that no mark of honor, even from the President of the United States, was equal to his fireman's badge. The continual "telling of 'em so" had aided in procuring for him his present official distinction, and was destined to earn higher honors for him at a future day.
The coroner tore off a fresh chew from a half hand of Cavendish which had been well gnawed at all the edges, and told Marcus that he might "fire away" again.