l
explode."

[Illustration: "EVERYTHING WAS BLOWN TO PIECES."]

Pondering this remarkable statement, I continued on my way, and
presently, not seeing any big building, asked a farmer where the
Atlantic Dynamite Works were. He swept the horizon with his arm, and
said they were all about us; they covered hundreds of acres--little, low
buildings placed far apart, so that if one exploded it wouldn't set off
the rest.

"The dynamite-magazines are along the hillside yonder," he said. "If
they went up, I guess there wouldn't be much left of the town."

"What town?" said I.

"Why, Kenvil. That's where the dynamite-mixers live. It's over there.
Quickest way is across this field and over the fence."

I followed his advice, and presently passed near a number of small brick
buildings so very innocent-looking that I found myself saying, "What!
_this_ blow up, or _that_ little sputtering shanty wreck a town?" It
seemed ridiculous. I learned afterward that I had walked through the
most dangerous part of the works; it isn't size here that counts.

I paused at several open doors, and got a whiff of chemicals that made
me understand the dynamite-sickness of which I had heard. No man can
breathe the strangling fumes of nitric acid and nitrated glycerin
without discomfort, and every man here _must_ breathe them. They rise
from vats and troughs like brownish-yellow smoke; they are in the
mixing-rooms, in the packing-rooms, in the freezing-house, in the
separating-house, everywhere; and they take men in the throat, and make
their hearts pound strangely, and set their heads splitting with pain.
Not a workman escapes the dynamite-headache; new hands are wretched with
it for a fortnight, and even the well-seasoned men get a touch of it on
Monday mornings after the Sunday rest.

In walking about the works I noticed that the several buildings,
representing different steps in the manufacture of explosives, are
united by long troughs or pipes sufficiently inclined to allow the
nitroglycerin to flow by its own weight from one building to another, so
that you watch the first operations in dynamite-making at the top of a
slope, and the last ones at the bottom. Of course this transportation by
flow is possible for nitroglycerin only while it is a liquid, and not
after it has been absorbed by porous earth and given the name of
dynamite and the look of moist sawdust. As dynamite it is transported
between buildings on little railroads, with hors