The San Francisco Call. Newspaper, July 9, 1899, Page 21

low San Francisco’s 'Fire Educate and Helpers. up-to- rust in footed a: the bell to harne of the under present riotta rty-three the e 2¥ within 1o short then, by 1 from r was y of potential during her short than was her im- istory countr: the records of r efforts, belittle her achiev hd refer to her endow- nts of ¢ utive ability, political sa- ental culture and strong wom- > and dispos! > to match rtment. wont have been otherwise discovered. The an 1] becomes a sort of four-foots ed hero, apparently possessed of the spirit of that element he is in service to quench. There are always a number of people who rush, the moment they n “They’re Off!” the he DE hear the fire gong strike, to see hitching of the horses, blocking doors and many times narrow ing injury as the apparatus is whirled out into the street and off to the fire. “Just at those anima ex- anly character In the most impersonal and incidental manner. It was her re- gal training, her dominant spirit, her constant insistence, which prevailed over the weak, vacillating, easily influ- enced and almost effeminate character of Maximilian. It w Carlotta’s ambition to be an Empress that was the cause of their misfortunes. Had she walted for the drama of clrcumstance to unfold itself - SAD FAL "fl*"‘ b4 O K‘\;_Tl‘j\ B she would have occupied the Austrian throne, for Maximilian would have suc- ceeded Francis Joseph, his brother, whose only son, Rudolph, committed suicide. PRINCESI.AGNES SALM SAT Carlott 1s more in affinity with the American people than are other daugh- ters of kings, because she came, even through misgulded enterprise, to a land whose border is our own, and the study claim of these spectators. “Did you ever see anything like the excite- ment that takes possession of them at the mere thought of a fire?” You admit that you never did, and the enthusiastic spectator, who has one probably made the same observations 2 hundred times over to as many casual acquaintances, rattles on. “You bet they want to get there. They seem to know as much about it as the firemen.” All enthusiasts think the same way— that the fire horse was born to the bust- ness. They see the slashing bays, or grays, or blacks, as the case may be, jump to thelir places. They see equine eves flash and horses’ ears go back, the tails swish and the hoofs stamp in the few seconds it takes to prepare them to respond to the alarm. Then, with the driver in his seat—"They're off!” For the moment, certainly, the horse is transformed. He appears an equine deity, striking sparks with his iro -shod heels from the cobbles he spurns as he races along, his harness glittering and jingling, smoke streaming from the engine, He I8 the one grand figure, 80 powerful as to appear irresistible. No Wonder the fire horse is a popular hero; no wonder you hear marvelous tales of his intelligence and bravery. It stands to reason, of course, that the animals owned by the department are of a superior class. If they were not they would not be in the depart- ment. The rigid examinations by the veterinary, followed by the tests of the trainer, prove that every animal is gound in wind and limb, at the perfec- tion of youthful strength, and capable of putting every pound of his registered weight into the work for which he is destined. To keep the horse in this health is the main problem with his masters. It is only possible with ex- treme care. The animals are washed, currycombed and dusted uncea they are exercised at such Intervals have been found the most profitable; they are given good stalls, with plenty of clean barley straw to bed them; and, above all,-they are fed after the most modern and reasonable fashion. None of your hard grain for the fire horse. The day for that has passed, in San Francisco at least. He gets the best of hay and oats, but the oats are steamed. There is no danger that a hard kernel may get into the digestive apparatus of one of the department horses and glve him that excruclating affliction, appen- dicitis. Under this regimen his coat keeps glossy and his eye bright. To every driver his Is the best horse n the department—can do everything but talk. He generally calls him “Major,” or “Prince,” or “Dandy,” rubs the animal’s nose when he has nothing else to do, and is willing to expatiate on the equine wonders under his control 111 the bell taps or the cows come home. To the prosaic department, however, no horse in it, no matter what a prodigy, has a name. When he is for and turned into the stables Lis f{dentity is sunk in a number. He is liable to anv sort of work, from draw- ing the chief’s buggy to hauling hay for his fellows,, or coal to the puffing engines on duty One driver may have him one day, another the next, but the department horse does mnot complain, and seldom gets sicl Department horse 18 overtaken by any of the ills that equine flesh is heir to, there are provided for him hospital accommodations that can- not be improved upon. He is returned to the training stables, where, under the care of Superintendent Harris and his men, he has everything that would tend to alleviate suffering and put him on the high road to recovery. There are all the attendants possible; the vet- erinary is there for the smallest ail- ment, the dispensary has a full supply of every drug useful for the horse. There is the best of ventilation and sewerage and the softest of lights. Comparatively, the hospital accommo- dations provided throughout the coun- try for humanity are not so complete as the hospital for horses maintained by the San Francisco F Department. When the afflicted animal is convales- cing there is an exercising yard of warm sand, where he can take his sun bath and romp and roll till he is himself again. One team, above all others, has car- ried to its separation by death the hon- ors for all brethre There were three of “Pup,” “Mush” and “Bob."” it: them, Their driver, Jack Hayden, is now stationed with 21 engine, at Oak and Devisadero streets. At the time of the first horse show in this city the horses were stationed at the house of engine 2, on Bush street, near Kearny, and there was hardly a minute of the day when they were on duty that the sidewalk In front of the engine house was not filled with admire “Pup,” “Mush” and “Bob" were dap- ple grays, big rangy fellows with flow- ing silvery manes and tails that were y dreams of fluffiness. “Mush” was the darkest, a steel grav, and will be re- membered as the off horse of the trio in the hitch-up. Poor “Mush” went to the boneyard moons ago. After partici- pating in the highest honors that can fall to a horse he fell in the discharge of duty. One midnight that the fashionables of San Francisco will long remember ths bell tap summoned ‘“Mush” and his mates to answer an alarm of fire just at the close of a Mardi Gras ball at the Hopkins Institute of Art The gra wonders of engine 2 dashed out of their house and ran to Dupont, un Dupont to Pine and then took the heart-break- ing hill, up, up. to Powell—two blocks of the steepest grade a municipality ever cobbled. Engine 2 got there the efforts of ‘“Mush,” who cast two shoes, so hard did he pull. Afterward it was found the brave animal had rup- tured an intestine. For two full months afterward he went on, responding cheerfully to calls, then suddenly sick- ened and dled. His end was so sudden that an autopsy was determined upon, It revealed the hidden hurt that had brought him to his herolc death. That death broke up the team and now they are scattered. “Pup” is at one station and “Bob’” at another. Their driver is at a third, but they are all still in the department they have served g0 well. Their feats will remain ever fresh in the memory of all within the fire lines, and many without. mainly through of her life and character, her ambitions, triumphs and utter failure must find sympathetic response in the heart of every American woman. If her star had reached its nith later in the century her memory would have lived, perpetu- ated by her sisters, not for the ambi- tious Empress, but for the high princi- ple of genuine womanhood evidenced by the good she did and the charities she dispensed. The childhood of Carlotta was ren- dered serious with responsibilities and tuition beyond her years. Her mother, whom history has named the “Holy Quee died when the little girl was ten vears old, and for several years the dark cloud of mourning ¢ shadowed the palace. Court etiquette and queen- ly dignity, amounting to austerity, were constantly instilled into her brain and heart and made the deepest and most lasting impressions upon Carlot- ta’s childhood. While vet a child she knew thoroughly the inviolate rules of court precedence. Her father educated hear to be a queen. She was precocious, and un- wisely he forced upon her responsibili- ties far beyond her years. At seventeen she was far In advance of her years in intelligence, and it was then that she met her hero, Archduke Maximilian, younger brother of Francis Joseph, Emperor of Austria. He was tall and fair and gentle, of military bearing and spotless character, and eight years her senior.. It was a case of love at first sight and in two months they were married. She, ambitious, energetic, possessed of the executive force of a man; he, weak, vacillating, trustful in the goodness of men and idealized into her hero. For five years they lived at Miramar When a Fire ~astle, on the outskirts of Trieste, Maximilian having been appointed Governor of the Lombard-Venetlan kingdom, and there Carlotta passed the few untroubled years of her life. Then, at the ry acme of all that was beautiful and harmonious in her life, the Goddess of Fortune appeared with her tempting offer of a scepter nd a crown. It was the story of the rden of Eden told again in different hase, and once more it was Eve who fell, for it. was due to Carlotta’s am- bition more than to the importunities of the Mexican delegation that Maxi- milian finally accepted the golden apple of empire and thus attuned the instru- ment which was destined to play his own and his wife's requiem. However, to the credit of Maximilian Ve it sald, the first offer was unqualifiedly de- clined, but when the delegation came the secand time, bearing what seemed t a majority of all the ico joined with them in the request, he yielded, and the first act of the tragedy began. The reception of the embassy at the castle of Miramar is a tableau which closes the last act of the drama of Carlotta’s life before the curtain rose upon the tragedy. It presents a picture which In retrospect seems almost pro- phetic of strife, turmoll, sadness and despair. Tt is not my intention to repeat here history famiilar to every good Ameri- can. Carlotta was the sacrifice upon the altar of nations, and she was. ex- actly 24 years of age, Maximilian 33, when thelr eyes beheld for the first time the land where they hoped to re- generate a nation. Their entry into the City of Mexlco was a triumphal one. The splendors of their court were un- precedented. Carlotta knew how to be an Empre: I shall never forget her in her royal robes of state. She was radiantly lovely, lithe and graceful of figure, eminently befitted to adorn a crown. The royal pair resided at the palace of Chapultepee, which is four miles from the city, on the outskirts of Tacu- baya, at the extremity of the Paseo de la Reforma, one of the rhost magnifi- cent boulevards in. the world and which, under the delicate touch of Car- lotta's genius and taste, became, and remains “to-da the most beautiful. The palace, or as it was then called, the castle of Chapultepee, was at that time an uninviting mass of chaotic masonry, surmounting a tic agglomeration of bowlders which some prehistoric seismic disturbance had projected out of the plain.- It was practically in the same condition in which the Amerieans left it after the battle which has made its name historic. The beautiful park which surrounds it was neglected, the resort of wander- ing animals and bandits, and Carlotta’s first work was its renovation. Her deft hand left its imprint everywhere among the giant cypress trees in the in the new and winding road- among the new statuary, in the nation of Montezuma's Bath, in every vista that the eyes sought and in every pathway upon which the feet could tread. Her own private garden was, and still’ remains, upon the roof of the castle, and there, among her favorite flowers, the young Empress and her husband passed their hours of leisure. There she tended the growing plants with her own hands; there no servant ever entered save under spe- cific directions, and from it even the Emperor was excluded bv his own order, except when invited to partici- pafte in its beauties by its fair autocrat. There are, to-day, growing trees and shrubs in Carlotta’s garden which were planted by her own hands, and there is in preservation a bed of violets exactly as she planned and cared for Iit. Stranger still, in that land of changes, the gardener who assisted Carlotta presides over this spot still. Old and to be proofs ti people of Me Ie: bent, swarthy and forbidding of aspect, he speaks of Carlotta as reverently as he does of the Blessed Virgin. He keeps alive one human heart that has not fo gotten her, and her bed of violets looks the same now as it did when she last knelt beside it, unconscious of the fact that the grand structure created by her ambition was to fall in ruins and rob her of everything she possessed save life. Carlotta constituted herself president of the Woman’s Charitable Society, and never during her stay in Mexico did she neglect the affairs of state, regard- ing which she was at all times her hus. band’s chief adviser. There is no doubt that in the more important measures adopted by Maximilian she was the brains and the potential element. Then the United States interfered. Napoleon was ordered to withdraw his troops. Here again Carlotta was domi- nant. She would go herself to France and intercede with the Emperor. What can be more pathetic than the spectacle of this girl Empress, then but 26 years old, pleading with the Em- peror of France and the Pope of Rome for the means and soldiers to save from ruin the empire of her husband, at a time when Maximilian had been alreadv many weeks dead, murdered by the people he had vainly tried to rule? The wife, pleading for the husband’s pres- ervation weeks after that husband was moldering in his untimely grave! Tha Empress struggling against hope for the empire which had ceased to exist, for an Emperor who was slain! Carlotta’s ambition and pride were crushed, her heart broken, and then God, in His infinite mercy, drew the veil of forgetfulness over the mind of this earnest woman, in order that she might b. spared the agony that must have been hers with the knowledge of hen husband's awful death Young— only twenty-six—beautiful, ambitious, loving, on the very threshold of youth and hope, she was seized and torn from the world by the relentless hand of un- reason, and cast into the midnight of utter blank. For thirty-three years she has been banished to an oblivion that is worse than death. Im Belgium her name is an unspoken one, but in Palace Lack- en on the outskirts of Brus s, she has passed a third of a century waiting for her soul's release from its useless P on. She believes that she is still Empress of Mexico, awaiting the re- turn of Maximilian, who has gone at the head of his army to quell a revolt against his authority. Since Carlotta entered her retreat she has been seen by no one outside her household, which is conducted in an imperial manner from the -fortune left her by Leopold I. Every month of the vear Carlotta holds mimic court. The members of her ho hold, which num- bers more than three hundred persons, are presented to her in the same cere- monious manner in which Queen Vie- toria holds her drawing room. She presents them h gifts, which are formally recelved—the pictures taken from the v alls of the palace are presented, and then the following day are restored to their places—merely to indulge her demented fancy. courtier and lady of honor pla part assigned with mimic dignity. The grounds surrounding the palace are not less in «rea than Manhattan Island itself, and there Carlotta drives about daily in her coach of state, with in attendanc There, too, sometimes wander among the flowers, planning improvements, as she did about the grounds of Cha- pultepec, in Mexico. Poor Carlotta! B el L @