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The boys of the Cambridge Manual Training School have a new lesson which has become very popular with them.

This is a fire drill.

The pupils are taught to go through the whole process of fighting a fire in the same way that the firemen do.

Before the boys are allowed to join the fire battalion they have to be drilled, taught to march, and are obliged to attend lectures on surgery, and how to help injured people until the doctor comes.

After the boys have gone through this first course of study, they begin their real fireman’s training.  They attend more lectures in which they learn how to handle the various ladders and machines which firemen use.  They have to learn how a fire engine is put together, what are the uses of every wheel and valve, and how to clean and care for each separate part of the engine; and when they are quite familiar with the various things used by firemen they pass on to the last stage of training.

This begins on March 1st, and from this time on the work is done out of doors.

A wooden building forty feet high, and provided with doors and windows exactly like a three-story house, is put up in the schoolyard, and it is with this building that the lessons are given.

Every Thursday afternoon an imaginary fire takes place in it.  The hose is run out, the ladders are raised, and the lads go to work with a will, saving imaginary lives, and fighting imaginary flames.

Each week some new complication is supposed to take place, and some extra machine has to be brought into use, until by the end of the school term they can handle every machine and ladder with the greatest ease.

When first the fire drill was introduced into the school, the boys were not obliged to take the study unless they wanted to; but it has become so popular that they are eager and anxious to take it, and now is part of the regular course of the school for all boys who are strong enough to stand the hard work it necessitates.

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Some time ago we talked about the moving of the village of Katonah.  Our friends in California can do better than that.  While New York moves houses, California moves mountains.

A dam is being built at San Diego, Cal., to gather water for the city.  Where the water supply for a city is not quite sufficient, darns are often built, to stop small rivers from flowing away to waste; and the water gathered by the barrier of wood, stone, or earth, as the case may be, is turned into the city to be used by the people.

In the San Diego work, a huge mass of rocky hillside overhung the canon which was to be dammed, and at the bottom of which the river flowed.

A canon is, as you doubtless know, a deep gorge or ravine, formed by the river that flows through it, and which little by little has worn away its bed until it has cut deep down into the heart of the land, hundreds of feet below its original level.