Emma Woodhouse, not quite twenty-one years of age, and blessed with a comfortable home and the expectation of an ample income in due time, found herself curious, one spring day, about a young man named Knoxville, the new neighbor across the grange. Frequenters of the village and dispensers of its gossip told extraordinary stories. Mr. Knoxville, they said, had offered the villagers on Michelmas Day last an entertainment he called a “Fire-Hose Rodeo,” in which he suspended a canvas fire hose from a thirty-foot-tall cranelike structure, climbed the structure, clutched the fire hose with both arms and legs near its nozzle, and attempted to hold on as the hose writhed and flapped about with water from the village hydrant rushing through it at extremely high pressure.