In consideration for the feelings of Engine Company No. 99 the details will be lightly touched.  The company does not like to be reminded of that day.  There was a great crowd, and hurry calls were sent in; and while the ambulance gong was clearing the way the men of No. 99 heard the crack of the S. P. C. A. agent’s pistol, and turned their heads away, not daring to look toward Erebus again.

When the firemen got back to the engine-house they found that one of them was dragging by the collar the cause of their desolation and grief.  They set it in the middle of the floor and gathered grimly about it.  Through its whiskers the calamitous object chattered effervescently and waved its hands.

“Sounds like a seidlitz powder,” said Mike Dowling, disgustedly, “and it makes me sicker than one.  Call that a man!—­that hoss was worth a steamer full of such two-legged animals.  It’s a immigrant—­that’s what it is.”

“Look at the doctor’s chalk mark on its coat,” said Reilly, the desk man.  “It’s just landed.  It must be a kind of a Dago or a Hun or one of them Finns, I guess.  That’s the kind of truck that Europe unloads onto us.”

“Think of a thing like that getting in the way and laying John up in hospital and spoiling the best fire team in the city,” groaned another fireman.  “It ought to be taken down to the dock and drowned.”

“Somebody go around and get Sloviski,” suggested the engine driver, “and let’s see what nation is responsible for this conglomeration of hair and head noises.”

Sloviski kept a delicatessen store around the corner on Third avenue, and was reputed to be a linguist.

One of the men fetched him—­a fat, cringing man, with a discursive eye and the odors of many kinds of meats upon him.

“Take a whirl at this importation with your jaw-breakers, Sloviski,” requested Mike Dowling.  “We can’t quite figure out whether he’s from the Hackensack bottoms or Hongkong-on-the-Ganges.”

Sloviski addressed the stranger in several dialects that ranged in rhythm and cadence from the sounds produced by a tonsilitis gargle to the opening of a can of tomatoes with a pair of scissors.  The immigrant replied in accents resembling the uncorking of a bottle of ginger ale.

“I have you his name,” reported Sloviski.  “You shall not pronounce it.  Writing of it in paper is better.”  They gave him paper, and he wrote, “Demetre Svangvsk.”

“Looks like short hand,” said the desk man.

“He speaks some language,” continued the interpreter, wiping his forehead, “of Austria and mixed with a little Turkish.  And, den, he have some Magyar words and a Polish or two, and many like the Roumanian, but not without talk of one tribe in Bessarabia.  I do not him quite understand.”

“Would you call him a Dago or a Polocker, or what?” asked Mike, frowning at the polyglot description.

“He is a”—­answered Sloviski—­“he is a—­I dink he come from—­I dink he is a fool,” he concluded, impatient at his linguistic failure, “and if you pleases I will go back at mine delicatessen.”