DENNIS RYER

No one but an athlete with muscles and nerves of steel could have performed the feat which made Dennis Ryer famous. A flat was on fire, and the tenants had fled; but one, a woman, bethought herself of her parrot and went back for it, to find escape by the stairs cut off when she attempted to reach the street. With the parrot-cage, she appeared at the top-floor window, framed in smoke, calling for help.

There was no ladder to reach. There were neighbors on the roof with a rope, but the woman was too frightened to use it herself. Dennis Ryer made it fast about his own waist, and bade the others let him down and hold on for life. He drew the woman out, but she was heavy, and it was all his helpers above could do to hold the weight. To pull them over the cornice was out of the question. Upon the highest step of the ladder, many feet below, stood Ryer's father, himself a fireman of another company, and saw his boy's peril.

"Hold fast, Dennis!" he shouted. "If you fall I will catch you." Had Dennis let go, all three would have been killed. With a glance the young fireman saw the danger, and the one way of escape. The window before which he swung, half smothered by the smoke that belched from it, was the last in the house. Just beyond, in the window of the adjoining house, was safety if he could but reach it.

Putting out a foot, he kicked the wall, and made himself swing toward the window, once, twice, bending his body to add to the motion. The third time he all but passed it, and took a mighty grip on the frightened woman, shouting into her ear to loose her own hold at the same time. As they passed the window on the fourth trip, he thrust her through sash and all with a supreme effort, and himself followed on the next rebound, while the street, that was black with a surging multitude, rang with a mighty cheer. Old Washington Ryer, on his ladder, threw his cap in the air, and cheered louder than all the rest. But the parrot was dead-frightened to death very likely, or smothered.

SERGEANT VAUGHAN

No account of heroic life-saving at fires could pass by the marvelous feat, or feats, of John R. Vaughan. The alarm rang in station No. 3 at 3.20 o'clock one Sunday morning. Sergeant Vaughan, hastening to the fire with his men, found a huge five-story hotel ablaze from roof to cellar. The fire had shot up the elevator shaft, round which the stairs ran, and from the first had made escape impossible. Men and women were jumping and hanging from windows. One, falling from a great height, came within an inch of killing the sergeant as he tried to enter the building.

Darting up the stairs in the next house, and leaning out of a window with his whole body, while one of the crew hung on to one leg, he took a half-hitch with the other in some electriclight wires that ran up the wall, trusting to his rubber boots to protect him from the current, and made of his body a living bridge for the safe passage from the last window of the burning hotel of three men and a woman whom death stared in the face, steadying them as they went with his free hand.

Sergeant Vaughan then went up on the roof. The smoke was so dense that he could see little, but through it he heard a cry for help, and made out the shape of a man standing upon a window-sill in the fifth story, overlooking the courtyard of the hotel. The yard was between them. Bidding his men follow - they were five, all told — he ran down and around in the next street to the roof of the house that formed an angle with the hotel wing. There stood the man below him, only a jump away, but a jump which no mortal might take and live. His face and hands were black with smoke. Vaughan, looking down, thought him a negro. The man was perfectly calm.

"It is no use," he said, glancing up. "Don't try. You can't do it."

The sergeant looked wistfully about him. Not a stick or a piece of rope was in sight. Every shred was used below. There was absolutely nothing.

"But I couldn't let him die," he said to me, months after, when he had come out of the hospital a whole man again, and was back at work—"I just couldn't, standing there so quiet and brave." To the man he said sharply:

"I want you to do exactly as I tell you, now. Don't grab me, but let me get the first grab." He had noticed that the man wore a heavy overcoat, and had already laid his plan.

"Don't try," urged the man. "You cannot save me. I shall stay here till it gets too hot; then I shall jump."

"No, you won't," from the sergeant, as he lay at full length on the roof, looking over. "It is a pretty hard yard down there. I will get you, or die myself."

The four firemen sat on the sergeant's legs as he swung free down to the waist; so he was almost able to reach the man on the window with outstretched hands.

"Now jump -quick!" he commanded; and the man jumped. He caught Vaughan by both wrists as directed, and the sergeant got a grip on the collar of his coat.

"Hoist!" he shouted to the four on the roof; and they tugged with their might. The sergeant's body did not move. Bending over till his back creaked, he hung over the edge, a weight of two hundred and three pounds suspended from and holding him down. The cold sweat started upon his men's foreheads as they tried and tried again, without gaining an inch. Blood dripped from Sergeant Vaughan's nostrils and ears. Sixty feet below was the paved courtyard; over against him the window, behind which he saw the back-draft coming, gathering headway with lurid, swirling smoke. Then it burst through, burning the hair and the coats of the two men. an instant Vaughan thought all hope was gone.

For

But in a flash it came back to him. To relieve the terrible dead weight that wrenched and tore at his muscles, he was swinging the man to and fro like a pendulum, head touching head. He could swing him up! A smothered shout warned his men. They crept nearer the edge without letting go their grip on him, and watched with staring eyes the human pendu

lum swing wider and wider, farther and farther, until now, with a mighty effort, it swung within their reach. They caught the skirt of the coat, held on, pulled in, and in a moment lifted him over the edge.

They lay upon the roof, all six, breathless, sightless, their faces turned to the winter sky. The tumult of the street came up as a faint echo; the spray of a score of engines pumping below fell upon them, froze, and covered them with ice. The very roar of the fire seemed far off.

The sergeant was the first to recover. He carried down the man he had saved, and sent him off to the hospital. Then first he noticed that the man was not a negro; the smut had been rubbed off his face. Monday dawned before he came to, and days passed before he knew his rescuer. Sergeant Vaughan was laid up himself then. He had returned to his work, and finished it; but what he had gone through was too much for human strength. It was spring before he returned to his quarters, to find himself promoted.

-Abridged.

3. HEROIC FIREMEN

CLEVELAND MOFFETT

FIREMAN MCDERMOTT

It was a pleasant afternoon, and Fifth Avenue was crowded with people gathered to watch the parade. A gayer scene would have been hard to find at three o'clock, or a sadder one at four.

Suddenly there sounded hoarse shouts and the angry clang of fire-gongs, and down the street came Hook and Ladder 4 on a dead run, straight at the pompous procession, whose members immediately became badly scared and took to their heels. But the big ladders went no farther. They were needed here, badly needed; for the Windsor Hotel was on fire, far gone with fire, before ever the engines were called.

The reason for the delay was that everybody supposed that

of course somebody had sent the alarm. The crowd watched the fire, and waited for the engines, ten, fifteen minutes; by that time a great column of flame was roaring up the elevator-shaft, while people on the roof, in their madness, were jumping down to the street. Then some sane citizen went to a fire-box and rang the call, and within ninety seconds Engine 65 was on the ground. After her came Engines 54 and 21.

But there was no making up that lost fifteen minutes. The fire had things in its teeth now, and three, four, five alarms went out in quick succession. Twenty-three engines had their streams on the flames in almost as many minutes. The big fire-tower came from Thirty-sixth Street, besides six hookand-ladder companies.

Let us watch for a moment Hook and Ladder 21. The rush of her galloping horses was echoing up the avenue just as Battalion Chief John Binns made out a woman in a seventhstory window, where the fire was raging fiercely. The woman was holding a little dog in her arms, and it looked as if she was going to jump. The chief waved her to stay where she was, and, running toward 21, motioned toward Forty-sixth Street, whereupon the tiller-man at his back wheel did a pretty piece of steering, and even as they swung the long truck in the turn the crew began hoisting the big ladder. Such a feat is rarely done, for the swaying of that ten-ton mass might easily upset the truck; but every second counted here, and they took the chance.

As they drew along the curb, Fireman McDermott sprang up the slowly rising ladder. Two men came behind with scaling-ladders, for they saw that the main ladder would never reach the woman. Five stories only did it reach; then McDermott, standing on the top round, smashed one of the scaling-ladders through a sixth-story window, and climbed on; smashed the second scaling-ladder through a seventh-story window, and five seconds later had the woman in his arms.

To carry a woman down the front of a burning building on