the troughs as the drums are slowly revolved.]

It was a biograph operator that was engaged in taking pictures of a
fire department rushing to a fire. Several pieces of apparatus had
passed--an engine, hook-and-ladder company, and the chief; the operator,
with his (then) bulky apparatus, large camera, storage batteries, etc.,
stood right in the centre of the street, facing the stream of engines,
hose-wagons, and fire-patrol men. In order to show the contrast, an
old-time hand-pump engine, dragged by a dozen men and boys, came along
at full speed down the street, and behind and to one side of them
followed a two-horse hose-wagon, going like mad. The men running with
the old-time engine, not realising how narrow the space was and unaware
of the plunging horses behind, passed the biograph man on one side on
the dead run. The driver of the rapidly approaching team saw that there
was no room for him to pass on the other side of the camera man, and his
horses were going too fast to stop in the space that remained. He had
but an instant to decide between the dozen men and their antiquated
machine and the moving-picture outfit. He chose the latter, and, with a
warning shout to the photographer, bore straight down on the camera,
which continued to do its work faithfully, taking dozens of pictures a
second, recording even the strained, anxious expression on the face of
the driver. The pole of the hose-wagon struck the camera-box squarely
and knocked it into fragments, and the wheels passed quickly over the
pieces, the photographer meanwhile escaping somehow. By some lucky
chance the box holding the coiled exposed film came through the wreck
unscathed.

When that series was shown on the screen in a theatre the audience saw
the engine and hook-and-ladder in turn come nearer and nearer and then
rush by, then the line of running men with the old engine, and then--and