butler, and half a dozen servants and labourers, with pickaxes
and gunpowder, a hanging stove and a poker, together with a basket of
cold meat and two or three bottles of Madeira: for the Squire thought,
with many others, that a copious supply of provision is a very
necessary ingredient in all rural amusements.

Mr Milestone superintended the proceedings. The rock was excavated,
the powder introduced, the apertures strongly blockaded with fragments
of stone: a long train was laid to a spot which Mr Milestone fixed on
as sufficiently remote from the possibility of harm: the Squire seized
the poker, and, after flourishing it in the air with a degree of
dexterity which induced the rest of the party to leave him in solitary
possession of an extensive circumference, applied the end of it to the
train; and the rapidly communicated ignition ran hissing along the
surface of the soil.

At this critical moment, Mr Cranium and Mr Panscope appeared at the
top of the tower, which, unseeing and unseen, they had ascended on the
opposite side to that where the Squire and Mr Milestone were
conducting their operations. Their sudden appearance a little dismayed
the Squire, who, however, comforted himself with the reflection, that
the tower was perfectly safe, or at least was intended to be so, and
that his friends were in no probable danger but of a knock on the head
from a flying fragment of stone.

The succession of these thoughts in the mind of the Squire was
commensurate in rapidity to the progress of the ignition, which having
reached its extremity, the explosion took place, and the shattered
rock was hurled into the air in the midst of fire and smoke.

Mr Milestone had properly calculated the force of the explosion; for
the tower remained untouched: but the Squire, in his consolatory
reflections, had omitted the consideration of the influence of sudden
fear, which had so violent an effect on Mr Cranium, who was just
commencing a speech concerning the very fine prospect from the top of
the tower, that, cutting short the thread of his observations, he
bounded, under the elastic influence of terror, several feet into the
air. His ascent being unluckily a little out of the perpendicular, he
descended with a proportionate curve from the apex of his projection,
and alighted not on the wall of the tower, but in an ivy-bush by its
side, which, giving way beneath him, transferred him to a tuft of
hazel at its base, which, after upholding