observed high and safe, with whole wheels, on the sidewalk.
The fearful coming of the engine could break up the most intricate
muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had been swearing for
the half of an hour.

A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing
that he loved with a distant dog-like devotion. They had been
known to overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, striking
sparks from the cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures
to be ineffably admired. The clang of the gong pierced his breast
like a noise of remembered war.

When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested.
Before he reached a great age, he had a fair record.

He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck
and fight with other drivers. He had been in quite a number of
miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had
become known to the police. Once he had been arrested for
assaulting a Chinaman. Two women in different parts of the city,
and entirely unknown to each other, caused him considerable
annoyance by breaking forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals,
into wailings about marriage and support and infants.

Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly
and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"