The great city was sound asleep. It was the deadest hour of the night, if we may apply that term to three o’clock in the morning, the hour at which most people have sought and found their pillows. Late revellers had ceased to shout and sing, early risers had yet a good hour of rest before them, if not more. Of course there were many wakeful sick folk—ah! how many in that mighty¹ hive called London! But these did not disturb the profound quiet that had descended² on the city: only a few weak but steady lights in windows here and there told of their existence.

Among the sleepless³, on that calm dark night, there was one man to whom we draw attention. His bronzed cheeks and tall muscular frame told that he was not one of the wakeful sick, neither was he a sick-nurse, to judge from things around him. He sat with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped, gazing into the fire and meditating—perhaps building castles in the flames. His eyebrows⁴ were very bushy and his looks stern, but there was a play of gentle, kindly⁵ feeling round his mouth. He was one of a gallant⁶ band of picked men whose duty it is to do battle with the flames, a member of the London Fire-brigade. Two other men like himself lay on two little iron beds sound asleep with their clothes on. There was this difference between them, however, that the wakeful man wore brass⁷ epaulettes on his shoulders. Brass helmets and axes hung round the room. A row of boots hung in a rack, a little telegraph instrument stood on a table near a map of London, and a small but sociable⁹ clock ticked on the wall.

That clock had quite a lively, cheerful tick. It seemed to talk to the fireman with the bushy brows until he smiled and looked at it.

“Tic—tic—tic!” said the man, “how low and gentle your voice seems to-night. Everything is so still and quiet, that you appear to be only whispering the flight of time.”

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