- Fire Commissioner Lilly: [following the fire department's life net test] Well, at least the sidewalk broke its fall.
- Claymore Gregg: There is a right way to make a fire and a wrong way. This is wrong. Actually, if I wasn't in such a hurry I'd make the fire myself by rubbing two stick together or by using flint and steel.
- Martha Grant: Well, you'll just have to rough it with bellows and kerosene.
- Claymore Gregg: [leaving a smoke-filled room] Boy, I couldn't see a thing in there, Martha. This calls for drastic action.
- Martha Grant: Like what?
- Claymore Gregg: [raising up his extinguisher] Well, like reading these instructions.
- [Carolyn works on an editorial to condemn the old #17 fire engine]
- Capt. Daniel Gregg: May I suggest, madam, that you are not taking the best course of action?
- Candice Muir: He's right, Mom.
- Jonathan Muir: Listen to him.
- Capt. Daniel Gregg: If I were you, I'd go to the county fire commissioner and get HIM to condemn the engine.
- Candice Muir: He's wrong, Mom.
- Jonathan Muir: Don't listen to him.
- [Carolyn returns home to find Gull Cottage full of smoke]
- Martha Grant: [rushing out] It's okay, Mrs. Muir. Just looks like Los Angeles on a clear day, but I called the fire department anyway.
- Fire Commissioner Lilly: [timing the Schooner Bay fire department] It's taken them twenty-eight minutes to get here.
- Carolyn Muir: Don't forget, Commissioner, they've had to come a whole mile.
- Fire Commissioner Lilly: My grandmother made better time riding sidesaddle for the Pony Express, and she fell off a lot.
- Claymore Gregg: D'you realize that there are three generations of Schooner Bayites who just love that gallant old fire engine?
- Carolyn Muir: The radiator boiled over, the water pump didn't work, the hose didn't even have a nozzle, and the poor thing can't go but ten miles an hour.
- Claymore Gregg: So?
- Carolyn Muir: So?
- Claymore Gregg: So it has a few inconveniences. Where is your sentiment, Mrs. Muir?
- Carolyn Muir: Sentiment will not put out a fire.
- Claymore Gregg: Then I stand on the record: Only two houses have burned down in the past five years.
- Carolyn Muir: There've been only two fires in the last five years.
- Claymore Gregg: A mere detail.
- Claymore Gregg: [citing the current regulations that have not been changed since 1911] There's not one thing on this paper, Commissioner, that that engine can not meet.
- [the fire brigade all starts to concur at once]
- Claymore Gregg: At ease, men, steady, 'tention!
- [back to Commissioner Lilly]
- Claymore Gregg: Including the emergency pair of blinders we carry for the horses.
- Fire Commissioner Lilly: [dryly] You got a pair for me?