some whose
faces were mottled with fragments of stone, a kind of dynamite
tattooing, and some grievously injured. There are no limits to the fury
of dynamite, once it sets out to be cruel.

II

WE VISIT A DYNAMITE-FACTORY AND MEET A MAN WHO THINKS COURAGE IS AN
ACCIDENT

ON a certain pleasant morning in June, I set forth to visit a
dynamite-factory, and see with my own eyes, if might be, some of the men
who follow this strange and hazardous business. As the train rushed
along I thought of the power for good and evil that is in this wonderful
agent: dynamite piercing mountains; dynamite threatening armies and
blowing up great ships; a teacupful of dynamite shattering a fortress, a
teaspoonful of the essence of dynamite--that is, nitroglycerin--tearing
a man to atoms. What kind of fellows must they be who spend their lives
making dynamite!

In due course I found myself back in the hill land of northern New
Jersey, where everything is green and quiet, a lovely summer's retreat
with nothing in external signs to suggest an industry of violence. Stop;
here is a sign, though it doesn't seem much: two sleepy wagons lumbering
along the road between these cool woods and the waving fields. Farm
produce? Lumber? No. The first is loaded with a sort of yellow meal, and
trails the way with yellow sprinklings. That is sulphur. They use it at
the works. The second is piled up with crates, out of which come thick
glass necks like the heads of imprisoned turkeys. These are carboys of
nitric acid, hundreds of gallons of that terrible stuff which is so
truly liquid fire that a single drop of it on a piece of board will set
the wood in flames. This nitric acid mixed with innocent sweet glycerin
(_it_ comes along the road in barrels) makes nitroglycerin, and the
proper mixing of these two is the chief business of a dynamite-factory.

Farther down the road I came to a railroad track where a long
freight-train was standing on a siding. Some men were busy here loading
a car with clean-looking wooden boxes that might have held starch or
soap, but _did_ hold dynamite neatly packed in long, fat sticks like
huge fire-crackers. Each box bore this inscription in red letters: HIGH
EXPLOSIVES. DANGEROUS. I looked along the train and saw that there were
several cars closed and sealed, with a sign nailed on the outside:
POWDER. HANDLE CAREFULLY.

In this case "powder" means dynamite, for the product of a
dynamite-factory is always called