ns at the Arsenal, I who shirked every
labour as unkingly. So, however, it was: and the next morning I was at
it again after an early breakfast, my fingers at first quite stiff with
cold, for it blew a keen and January gale. By nine I had 820 fuses; and
judging those sufficient to commence with, got into the motor, and took
it round to a place called the East Laboratory, a series of detached
buildings, where I knew that I should find whatever I wanted: and I
prepared my mind for a day's labour. In this place I found incredible
stores: mountains of percussion-caps, more chambers of fuses, small-arm
cartridges, shells, and all those murderous explosive mixtures, a-making
and made, with which modern savagery occupied its leisure in
exterminating itself: or, at least, savagery civilised in its top-story
only: for civilisation was apparently from the head downwards, and never
once grew below the neck in all those centuries, those people being
certainly much more mental than cordial, though I doubt if they were
genuinely mental either--reminding one rather of that composite image of
Nebuchadnezzar, head of gold, breast brazen, feet of clay--head
man-like, heart cannibal, feet bestial--like aegipeds, and mermaids, and
puzzling undeveloped births. However, it is of no importance: and
perhaps I am not much better than the rest, for I, too, after all, am of
them. At any rate, their lyddites, melanites, cordites, dynamites,
powders, jellies, oils, marls, and civilised barbarisms and obiahs, came
in very well for their own destruction: for by two o'clock I had so
worked, that I had on the first cart the phalanx of fuses; on the
second a goodly number of kegs, cartridge-cases and cartridge-boxes,
full of powder, explosive cottons and gelatines, and liquid
nitro-glycerine, and earthy dynamite, with some bombs, two reels of
cordite, two pieces of tarred cloth, a small iron ladle, a shovel, and a
crow-bar; the cab came next, containing a considerable quantity of loose
coal; and lastly, in the private carriage lay four big cans of common
oil. And first, in the Laboratory, I connected a fuse-conductor with a
huge tun of blasting-gelatine, and I set the fuse on the ground, timed
for the midnight of the twelfth day thence; and after that I visited the
Main Factory, the Carriage Department, the Ordnance Store Department,
the Royal Artillery Barracks, and the Powder Magazines in the Marshes,
traversing, as it seemed to me, miles of building; a