Page:De Amicis - Heart, translation Hapgood, 1922.djvu/282

250 teacher had assigned us to write, when I heard an unusual talking on the stairs, and shortly after two firemen entered the house, and asked permission of my father to inspect the stoves and chimneys, because a chimney was on fire on the roof, and they could not tell to whom it belonged.

My father said, “Pray do so.” And although we had no fire burning anywhere, they began to make the round of our apartments, and to lay their ears to the walls, to hear if the fire were roaring in the flues which run up to the other floors of the house.

While they were going through the rooms, my father said to me, “Here is the theme for your composition, Enrico,—the firemen. Try to write down what I am about to tell you.

“I saw them at work two years ago, one evening, when I was coming out of the Balbo Theatre late at night. On entering the Via Roma, I saw an unusual light, and a crowd of people collecting. A house was on fire. Tongues of flame and clouds of smoke were bursting from the windows and the roof; men and women appeared at the windows and then disappeared, uttering shrieks of despair. There was a dense throng in front of the door. The crowd was shouting: ‘They will be burned alive! Help! The firemen!’ At that moment a carriage arrived, four firemen sprang out of it—the first who had reached the town-hall—and rushed into the house. They had already gone in when a horrible thing happened: a woman ran to a window of the third story, with a scream, clutched the balcony, climbed down it, and remained thus clinging, almost suspended in space, with her back outwards,