Once a
fireman did not hesitate to faint, leaders and front-row and back-row girls alike had plenty of excuses for the fright that made them quicken their pace when passing some dark corner or ill-lighted corridor.
Harmon, the fireman lodger, passing through the kitchen on his way out to work, had paused to tell Saxon about the previous day's train-wreck in the Alviso marshes, and of how the engineer, imprisoned under the overturned engine and unhurt, being drowned by the rising tide, had begged to be shot.
"I don't know what's got into him," Saxon gasped hurriedly to the fireman. "He's not himself.
"I'll stay to the end of the week," the fireman was saying.
"Oh, I know you're a slugger--" the fireman's voice began.
Then I got to be a professor of gymnastics, so as to make better use of my talents; and then I was a sergeant
fireman at Paris, and assisted at many a big fire.
I lost my fireman; and the conductor and the Superintendent of Rolling Stock (who happened to be running down to Duran to meet his bride) had their heads knifed off by the Spiggoties and paraded around on poles.
Seth Manners was my fireman. I was breaking him in to engineer for himself, and I was letting him run the locomotive while I sat up in his seat meditating about Sarah here.
"'If you try to get rides that way,' I slung at her in Spiggoty Spanish (which they tell me is some different from regular Spanish), 'you'll be taking one smeared all over our cowcatcher and headlight, and it'll be up to my fireman to scrape you off.'
Why, it would merely say, 'Town burned down; no insurance; boy brast a window,
fireman brake his neck!' Why, THAT ain't a picture!"
Between the acts he mustered his following - three fellows he knew from the nail works, a railroad
fireman, and half a dozen of the Boo Gang, along with as many more from the dread Eighteen-and- Market Gang.
The London Fire Brigade criticised Peppa Pig for using the term "
fireman" instead of "firefighter" in an episode called The Fire Engine.