Lansing, and Edgerton Lawn, of the Lawn
Nitro-Powder Company, to witness a few tests at his cottage laboratory
on Storm Head; but at the same time he informed them with characteristic
modesty that he was not yet prepared to guarantee the explosive.

About noon his guests arrived before the cottage in a solemn file,
halted, and did not appear overanxious to enter the laboratory on Storm
Head. Also they carefully cast away their cigars when they did enter,
and seated themselves in a nervous circle in the largest room of the
cottage. Here their eyes instantly became glued to a great bowl which
was piled high with small rose-tinted cubes of some substance which
resembled symmetrical and translucent crystals of pink quartz. That was
Chaosite enough to blow the entire cliff into smithereens; and they were
aware of it, and they eyed it with respect.

First of all Selwyn laid a cubic crystal on an anvil, and struck it
sharply and repeatedly with a hammer. Austin's thin hair rose, and
Edgerton Lawn swallowed nothing several times; but nobody went to
heaven, and the little cube merely crumbled into a flaky pink powder.

Then Selwyn took three cubes, dropped them into boiling milk, fished
them out again, twisted them into a waxy taper, placed it in a
candle-stick, and set fire to it. The taper burned with a flaring
brilliancy but without odour.

Then Selwyn placed several cubes in a mortar, pounded them to powder
with an iron pestle, and, measuring out the tiniest pinch--scarcely
enough to cover the point of a penknife, placed a few grains in several
paper cartridges. Two wads followed the powder, then an ounce and a half
of shot, then a wad, and then the crimping.

The guests stepped gratefully outside; Selwyn, using a light
fowling-piece, made pattern after pattern for them; and then they all
trooped solemnly indoors again; and Selwyn froze Chaosite and boiled it
and baked it and melted it and took all sorts of hair-raising liberties
with it; and after that he ground it to powder, placed a few generous
pinches in a small hand-grenade, and affixed a primer, the secret
composition of which he alone knew. That was the key to the secret--the
composition of the primer charge.

"I used to play base-ball in college," he observed smiling--"and I used
to be a pretty good shot with a snowball."

They followed him to the cliff's edge, always with great respect for the
awful stuff he handled with such apparent carelessness. There wa