Page:St. Nicholas (serial) (IA stnicholasserial402dodg).pdf/548



summer I asked a prominent merchant of, when his town had had its last serious fire. “Not in three years,” he replied. I was moved to ask this question because I had found the fire apparatus in padlocked barns, or stations, with the keys in the hands of the police, who attended to the fire-fighting; and seemed, as compared to the remarkably quick methods employed in America, a somewhat dangerous form of fire protection. Lausanne is a town of about 50,000 population, and I wondered how many American cities of a like size could boast of only one serious fire in three years. Not many, I imagine.

In, a smaller city in Switzerland, of about 40,000 population, the conditions were practically the same, with the exception that each stable containing the fire apparatus had a notice posted on the door stating that the keys could he found in the neighboring hotels and drug-shops, and the citizens were expected to take out the engines in the event of a fire, while the firemen (volunteers) came on “call,” The alarm being sounded on all the church bells. Lucerne is a well-known tourist center, heavily populated during the summer months, and has many large shops filled with very inflammable material, and a great many very old buildings; and yet this place had had only two fires of any size within two years!

While I was attending the morning drill of the, in Saxony, the