n. Nobody
knows what set her off. Reg'lar miracle there wa'n't a lot killed. Man
in charge, feller named Ball, he went out to look at a water-pipe.
Hadn't been out the door a minute when off she went. Say, you'd oughter
seen the boys run! They tell me some of 'em jumped clean through the
winders, sashes an' all. If ye want to know more about it, there's my
boy now; he was right near the house when it happened."

We drew up at the Kenvil hotel, where a young man was sitting. Here was
the modern dynamite-worker, and not at all as I had pictured him. He
looked like a summer boarder who liked to take things easy and wear good
clothes. Wondering much, I sat down and talked to this young man, a
skilful dynamite-packer, it appears, who happened at the time to be
taking a day off.

"They put me at machine-packing a few days ago," he said, "and it's made
my wrist lame. Going to rest until Monday."

After some preliminaries I asked him about the process of packing
dynamite, and he explained how the freshly mixed explosive is delivered
at the various packing-houses in little tubs, a hundred pounds to a tub,
and how they dig into it with shovels, and mold it into shape on the
benches like so much butter, and ram it into funnels, and finally, with
the busy tamping of rubber-shod sticks, squeeze it down into the paper
shells that form the cartridges. One would say they play with
concentrated death as children play with sawdust dolls, but he declared
it safe enough.

"How large are the cartridges?" I asked.

"Oh, different sizes. The smallest are about eight inches long, and the
largest thirty. And they vary from one inch thick up to two and a half.
I know a man who carried a thirty-inch cartridge all the way to
Morristown in an ordinary passenger-car. He had it wrapped in a
newspaper, under his arm like a big loaf of bread. But say, he took
chances, all right."

At this another man informed us that people often carry nitroglycerin
about with them, and take no risk, by simply pouring it into a big
bottle of alcohol. Then it can do no harm; and when they want to use the
explosive, they have only to evaporate the alcohol.

The talk turned to precautions taken against accidents. In all
powder-mills the workmen are required to change their clothes before
entering the buildings, and to put on rubber-soled shoes. There must be
no bit of metal about a man's person, no iron nail or buckle, nothing
that could strike fire; and of cours