The Yellow Briar. Patrick Slater

We refreshed ourselves with peppermint bull’s-eyes made by Sugar John, who combined a tavern with a candy shop on the east side of Church Street.

      To make it a perfect day, a fire broke out that evening in a row of frame dwellings at the north-west corner of Richmond and Yonge streets. The flames shot up quickly, cutting into heavy clouds of smoke. Away everyone ran to the scene of the fire. The city had a paid fire marshal and several volunteer fire companies; but fires were frequent that summer, and only heaps of smouldering ashes usually marked their battle-scenes.

      The engagement opened that evening with a wild charge of one-horse carts. Drunken drivers whipped their old horses into action hell-split, wheeling batteries of water-barrels. The first carter with a civic licence arriving at a scene of a fire with a puncheon of water got a municipal grant of

3, Halifax currency. Subsequent hauling was done, however, on a time basis; and the second fillings arrived in a more leisurely fashion.

      After a time, the municipal fire-pump came on the scene. The hose was reeled off in lively fashion, and attached to a fire-plug on the water-main at Yonge Street. The volunteers rushed to man the pumps. They speedily discovered what everyone else already knew — that there was no pressure in the water-mains after nightfall. A meeting of excited ratepayers was held on the spot to protest against the wickedness of Mr. Furniss of the gas and water company. But he was there himself to tell them, good and plenty, he gave the town all that

250 had paid for. There was a great running together of newspaper editors and a deputation was finally dispatched to measure the depth of the water in the company’s tank. Meanwhile the flames licked up frame buildings at their pleasure; and things got so hot that the municipal pumping equipment itself caught fire. An enthusiastic detail of volunteers were busy pitching furniture out of upstairs windows, and smashing and rifling the contents of dwellings in and near the general direction of the blaze. People grabbed small things and ran home with them to save them from the fire.

      I was watching a tipsy carter in a dispute with an open-headed barrel of water, when the scene closed so far as I was concerned. Something had apparently lost its balance in the two-wheeled cart. The puncheon upset and won the argument. The carter disappeared in an avalanche of water. He emerged spluttering and talking loudly to God. At that moment a flying bed-mattress caught me fair on; and I went to earth beneath its enfolding arms. I wiggled out, only to dodge a flying jerry mug. I have not crossed the briny ocean, thought I, to have my head cracked with a dirty old thing like that. So I went off home and called it a day.