I say you do not understand it, ladies of the full purse and varied wardrobe.  You do not know what it is to live with a perpetual longing for pretty things—­to starve eight months in order to bring a purple dress and a holiday together.  What difference if it rained, hailed, blew, snowed, cycloned?

Maida had no umbrella nor overshoes.  She had her purple dress and she walked abroad.  Let the elements do their worst.  A starved heart must have one crumb during a year.  The rain ran down and dripped from her fingers.

Some one turned a corner and blocked her way.  She looked up into Mr. Ramsay’s eyes, sparkling with admiration and interest.

“Why, Miss Maida,” said he, “you look simply magnificent in your new dress.  I was greatly disappointed not to see you at our dinner.  And of all the girls I ever knew, you show the greatest sense and intelligence.  There is nothing more healthful and invigorating than braving the weather as you are doing.  May I walk with you?”

And Maida blushed and sneezed.

THE FOREIGN POLICY OF COMPANY 99

John Byrnes, hose-cart driver of Engine Company No. 99, was afflicted with what his comrades called Japanitis.

Byrnes had a war map spread permanently upon a table in the second story of the engine-house, and he could explain to you at any hour of the day or night the exact positions, conditions and intentions of both the Russian and Japanese armies.  He had little clusters of pins stuck in the map which represented the opposing forces, and these he moved about from day to day in conformity with the war news in the daily papers.

Wherever the Japs won a victory John Byrnes would shift his pins, and then he would execute a war dance of delight, and the other firemen would hear him yell:  “Go it, you blamed little, sawed-off, huckleberry-eyed, monkey-faced hot tamales!  Eat ’em up, you little sleight-o’-hand, bow-legged bull terriers—­give ’em another of them Yalu looloos, and you’ll eat rice in St. Petersburg.  Talk about your Russians—­say, wouldn’t they give you a painsky when it comes to a scrapovitch?”

Not even on the fair island of Nippon was there a more enthusiastic champion of the Mikado’s men.  Supporters of the Russian cause did well to keep clear of Engine-House No. 99.

Sometimes all thoughts of the Japs left John Byrnes’s head.  That was when the alarm of fire had sounded and he was strapped in his driver’s seat on the swaying cart, guiding Erebus and Joe, the finest team in the whole department—­according to the crew of 99.

Of all the codes adopted by man for regulating his actions toward his fellow-mortals, the greatest are these—­the code of King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table, the Constitution of the United States and the unwritten rules of the New York Fire Department.  The Round Table methods are no longer practicable since the invention of street cars and breach-of-promise suits, and our Constitution is being found more and more unconstitutional every day, so the code of our firemen must be considered in the lead, with the Golden Rule and Jeffries’s new punch trying for place and show.