Careers of Danger and Daring

"Now there was Billy Batcheller. He was a fine leaper, and could do his two somersaults over four elephants or eight horses with the prettiest lift you ever saw. He could do it...

He shook his head. "Wasn't any use trying. They'd have been shot by policemen as fast as we could get 'em out. Besides, we couldn't get 'em out. We concentrated on elephants, an...

These fears were justified just at the last on the New York tower, and a man named Jack McGreggor had an experience that might well have blanched his hair. They had reached the...

I finally got Bonavita to tell me about the time when the lion Denver attacked him. It was during a performance at Indianapolis, in the fall of 1900, and the trouble came at the...

"It's always the little things that frighten you," reflected Merrill, "not the big things. I'll give you an instance. When I went up inside St. Paul's steeple the first time (I...

The burying-ground of wrecks! What a sight from the rugged height back of the water! Here are blackened, shapeless hulks from the great river fire of 1900, when red-hot liners d...

Investigation has shown that these sound zones frequently establish themselves at sea (they vary in extent with wind and tide), so that the sound of horn or bell may be heard fo...

First, I followed a gaunt, black-faced Swede, with stubby beard, through his duties as locomotive hostler; saw him take the tired engines in hand, as they came in one after anot...

"Well," resumed Merrill, "this lightning stroke came down the new rod all right until it reached the bell-deck, and there it circled round and round the steeple four or five tim...

THE general opinion among wild-beast tamers is that the tiger is more to be feared than the lion. The one will kill a man as easily as the other, but the lion gives fair warning...

"Tell you where it's hard on an acrobat," put in Zorella--"that's where he _can't_ quit on account of his family--where he needs the money. I remember a young fellow joined the...

"He can't, usually. 'T was just luck they got me up in time. They say my face was black as a coal." And he had no more to tell of this adventure.

"Nothing of the sort," answers Leo Stevens; "it only proves that there is a big difference between a sand-bag man and a real man. The sand-bag is dead weight, and the man is liv...

It is remarkable how the position of an aeronaut's body may alter a balloon's movements. It is possible, for instance, to make a balloon ascend or descend, without touching valv...

AS I went time and again to the great East River Bridge, the new one whose huge steel towers were drawing to full height in the last months of the century, I found myself under...

Shall we think of firemen as braver than other men, as finer or more devoted? No and yes. I should say that most of them, to start with, had no such superiority, but came into t...

I WILL first tell a story, fresh in my memory, about a New Jersey village lost in the hills back of Lake Hopatcong, a charming, sleepy little village that reaches along a stream...

It was rising tide the next afternoon, an hour before slack water (slack water is the diver's harvest-time), when the crew of the steam-pump _Dunderberg_ gathered on deck to wit...

The arrangement of buildings in this part of the works makes clearer what was done at the nitrating-house by a certain Joshua Plumstead in the recent explosion. Joshua is a vete...

Let us come now to that placid summer afternoon, to that terrible Saturday, June 30, 1900, when tug-boats in the North River looked upon a fire the like of which the river had n...

He emphasized this, for instance, as essential in a man who would face that fury of waters, he must not be afraid. One would say that the rapids feel where the mastery is, wheth...

In my investigations I have heard various stories showing what uncertainty there is as to the behavior of dynamite in the presence of fire. Workmen who handle it constantly in b...

Produced by Suzanne Shell, Emmy and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet...

"I know," said Bronson, "they scatter something terrible. Say, I've noticed that sort of pleasant look in their faces, too. Once I was waiting on a siding, and a man came up and...