That Danbury youth who gets snarled up so badly when he is sent to do anything, and who has lived through no end of mustard plaster and other soothing applications, is standing in a doorway whistling.  Browne conceives it to be a capital idea to waylay this boy and interview him.  But, as if divining Browne’s purpose, the young hero gives a war-whoop and dives down a side alley.  Browne will write up the interview just the same, though.

Browne sees something lively now, something Danburian.  A fire company in lobster-colored shirts turn into Main street, aided and abetted by a brass band hired by the job to play furiously.  Browne admires the gallant firemen as they step along bravely, winking at the pretty girls on either side—­at the machine which glistens in the sun, and maintains a lively jingling of bells and brass-work as it joggles over the pavement.  “Ah,” thinks Browne, “this is gorgeous!” It is.  Browne’s instincts are generally correct.

The man who assists in carrying the bass drum has a sore thumb, a sensitively sore thumb.  Nothing more natural, when Sherman goes “marching through Georgia,” than that this thumb should come in for a share of attention.  The bang it gets sends the acutest pain running up and down its owner’s spine.  In a frenzy (in a moment, we may say, of emotional insanity) he draws a tomahawk and buries it in the head of the captain of that bass drum.  The infuriated musician, supposing it to be the cornet who has mutinied, at once gets his Smith & Wesson in range.  When the smoke has cleared away three shots are found to have taken effect—­two of them in a span of high-stepping horses attached to the elegant turnout of old Mrs. P——.  That estimable lady is spilled into the third-story window of an establishment where sits our old friend Hannah binding shoes.  The shock so far upsets poor Hannah’s reason that she turns a blood-curdling somersault out upon an awning, bounces back, and on her return trip carries away a swinging sign and a barber’s pole.  These heavy articles strike on a copper soda-fountain, which explodes with a fearful noise, and mortally wounds a colored man uninsured against accident. (Full particulars for the next twelve months in the insurance journals.) The gallant boys in red flannel, assuming from the commotion that a fire must be under way in the neighborhood, set the machine to work in a twinkling.  The leading hoseman in his hurry rams his bouquet into the fire-box, tries to screw his silver trumpet on the end of the hose, and stands on his stiff glazed hat to find out what kind of strategy is needed.  Then they proceed to drown out an ice-cream saloon on the wrong side of the street.

Browne is happy.  He climbs a lamppost, and sets to work taking notes as fast as his pencil can fly.  Somebody, mistaking his coat-tail pockets for the post-office, drops in a set of public documents (it is the last day of franking), which so interferes with Browne’s equilibrium that he falls over backward into an ash-barrel, after getting out of which he finds it rests him to write with his pencil in his teeth.  At last order is restored, the thumb is repaired, and the procession, getting untangled, moves off to the inspiriting strains of “Ain’t you glad,” etc.