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A couple of pieces of apparatus, a chemical tank and a pumper marked SALAMANDER VOLUNTEER FIRE COMPANY NO. 3 came along, veered out of the jam, and continued uptown. "If they know another way down, maybe we'd better follow them," Murell suggested. "They're not going down. They're going to the lumber plant, in case the fire spreads upward," I said.
There is a large bar with a marble vase, out of which the pumper gets the water; and there are a number of yellow-looking tumblers, out of which the company get it; and it is a most edifying and satisfactory sight to behold the perseverance and gravity with which they swallow it.
Sterne’s emphasis upon the machinery of his story-telling, especially his distraught pretense at logical sequence in the ordering of his material is here imitated. For example: near the close of a chapter the author summons his servant Pumper, but since the chapter bore the title “Der Brief” and the servant can neither read nor write a letter, he says the latter has nothing to do in that chapter, but he is to be introduced in the following one. Yet with Yorick’s inconsequence, the narrator is led aside and exclaims at the end of this chapter, “But where is Pumper?” with the answer, “Heaven and my readers know, it was to no purpose that this chapter was so named (and perhaps this is not the last one to which the title will be just as appropriate)”, and the next chapter pursues the whimsical attempt, beginning “As to whether Pumper will appear in this chapter, about that, dear reader, I
I exclaimed, 'The dining-room clock! I sprang from bed and went down, and found that the clock was fast, as it showed two minutes past twelve o'clock. I set back the hands to 11.55 and lay in bed again, and soon the pumper began as usual. The explanation was that the vibration of the rising and falling hammer was carried up to the bedroom by the wall, but the sound of the bell was never heard.
I was startled because this was almost the only man except the pumper and the train crews that had been there since I came. Once in a while a stray tramp had gone through, but this man was not a tramp. He wore a long overcoat, buttoned to his chin, with the collar turned up. A slouch hat pulled well down over his eyes so far concealed his face that his features were scarcely visible.
On Monday they will don the rags of a beggar-girl for Mr. Pumper, whose pathetic pictures of modern life draw such tears from the public, and on Tuesday they will pose in a peplum for Mr. Phoebus, who thinks that all really artistic subjects are necessarily B.C. They career gaily through all centuries and through all costumes, and, like actors, are interesting only when they are not themselves.
I found there was no day operator and the only house around was the section house, two miles up the track. The operator and pumper boarded there with the section boss; but the railroad company was magnanimous enough to furnish a velocipede for their use in going to and from the station.
"But the doctor says I must be quiet until this confounded thing heals a bit. Together, I think we could bluff the whole story out of those scoundrels." "Oh, never you fear," said the marshal; "I'll learn all there is to be learnt. You jest ask Alf Reesling what kind of a pumper I am." "Who is Alf Reesling?" "Ain't you heerd of him in Boston?
Yet, compared with some other imitations of the good Yorick, the volume contains but a moderate amount of lavish sentiment. The servant Pumper is a man of feeling, who grieves that the horses trod the dewdrops from the blades of grass.
A big tank for engine water was being filled by an old man in shirt and trousers, his naked chest shining a hundred yards away. Luke Whelan was his name; a vigorous pumper, he. "'Tis hard work it is, ye may say it. I have another tank or two to fill, an' keep filled, but I have long rests, and time for a grain o' baccy, glory be to God!
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