more enthusiastic champion of the Mikado’s men. Supporters of the Russian cause did well to keep clear of Engine-House No. 99.
Sometimes all thoughts of the Japs left John Byrnes’s head. That was when the alarm of fire had sounded and he was strapped in his driver’s seat on the swaying cart, guiding Erebus and Joe, the finest team in the whole department—according to the crew of 99.
Of all the codes adopted by man for regulating his actions toward his fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—the code of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department. The Round Table methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more and more unconstitutional every, day, so the code of our firemen must be considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries’s new punch trying for place and show.
The Constitution says that one man is as good as another; but the Fire Department says he is better. This is a too generous theory, but the law will not allow itself to be construed otherwise. All of which comes perilously near to being a paradox, and commends itself to the attention of the S. P. C. A.
One of the transatlantic liners dumped out at Ellis
[140]
