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After half an hour they gave up and went sleepily to bed. The next morning they heard that the fire had been in one of the novelty factories and that several houses had also been destroyed. "If the hydrants hadn't been open and the street clear, they say the whole block would have gone," the doctor reported.
"Pipe sweepers" was the next command, and the decks were thoroughly swept while the deck washers removed their shoes and socks. "Wet down decks!" and the washers sprang for the coils of hose attached to the fire hydrants. Every part of the decks was flushed with clean sea water and swabs, or deck-mops, were used where necessary. All this was a familiar routine to Whistler Morgan and his mates.
There had been one about ten years before that had devastated a large part of the city. And in February of this year there had been quite a tragic one in the Tribune Building. There was a fierce drifting snowstorm, so deep it was impossible to drag the engines through it, and some of the hydrants were frozen. Men had jumped from the windows to save their lives, and there had been quite a panic.
"I will convince you before I am done that I'm not a baby." Ben found it convenient to offer no reply to this plain statement of facts, and the three soldiers made their way back to the camp, and, having obtained their pails and filled them with water at the hydrants, they passed the guard without a question.
What sort of a 'temple of the Holy Ghost' is he, every atom and molecule of whose physical system is saturated and stenched with the vile fetor of tobacco; whose every vesicle is distended by its foul gases; whose brain and marrow are begrimed and blackened with its sooty vapors and effluxions; all whose pores jet forth its malignant stream like so many hydrants; whose prayers are breathed out, not with a sweet, but with a foul-smelling savor; who baptizes infants with a hand which itself needs literal baptism and purification as by fire; and who carries to the bed-side of the dying an odor which, if the 'immaterial essence' could be infected by any earthly virus, would subject the departed soul to quarantine before it could enter the gates of heaven?"
Sometimes the water is pumped direct to the fields in iron pipes and applied by means of hydrants and hose, as in a city water system. Overhead pipe lines are now recognized as the most perfect and satisfactory form of artificial watering. Two-inch pipes are run over frames several feet in height. These are arranged in parallel lines all over the fields about forty feet apart.
But people who live snugly at home, surrounded by springs, and wells, and streams, with cisterns, and reservoirs, and pipes, and hydrants, and jets, and fountains, playing at all times around them, are prone to underrate these sufferings; in fact, too prone, might I not say, to discredit everything that does not come under the sphere of their own observation?
The third time the bed was moved water dropped down upon my pillow, and the room was too small to re-locate the bed so that none of these unauthorized hydrants should moisten us. Then we tried our spare chamber, but that was equally damp. Suddenly I bethought myself of another war relic; and, hurrying to an old trunk, extracted an india-rubber blanket.
The water buckets served while the hose was made, and the mains were laid, and the hydrants set in place, and the trained firemen were made ready to take up the task.
Shake yourself; you're Aquarius, or the water-bearer, Flask; might fill pitchers at your coat collar. Don't you see, then, that for these extra risks the Marine Insurance companies have extra guarantees? Here are hydrants, Flask. But hark, again, and I'll answer ye the other thing. First take your leg off from the crown of the anchor here, though, so I can pass the rope; now listen.
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