At one time, the British Government had on hand at Woolwich Arsenal about a hundred tons of cordite that had begun to show signs of decomposition, and it was decided to burn it. The entire quantity was taken out into an open meadow, at what was supposed to be a very safe distance from the city limits. A train was laid to the pile and set on fire. For the same reason that the five tons of Sir Frederick Abel's guncotton detonated, this huge heap of cordite also detonated. Almost instantly after it was ignited, it exploded with most awful violence, and with very disastrous results. A number of buildings in the near vicinity were leveled to the ground. A few persons were killed and many more injured. THE IRREVERENT NATIVE After I had sold out my interests at Maxim, the place was taken over by a dynamite-manufacturing company. As there was left in one of the magazines a considerable quantity of dynamite when the property changed hands, the new concern, not choosing to sell it as their own manufacture, proceeded to utilize it as fertilizer upon a field of potatoes. One of the natives, with his team and helper, was engaged to do this work. They had been instructed to use great care in opening the cases, but they still held their own opinions about the care necessary, which were based largely upon the contempt that is born of familiarity, and, having arrived upon the potato-patch with a good, big load of dynamite, they began to knock the cases open in any old way. There were no surviving witnesses, not even the horses. AT FOLLY'S MERCY After I had sold the works at Maxim and had invented motorite, I needed a place in which to make the material, and hired a branch of the works there for that purpose. It was winter. My wife had accompanied me as a precautionary measure. She was sitting in the laboratory to keep warm, near a big barrel stove charged with bituminous coal. On entering the laboratory for something, my wife asked me what was in those two tin pails sitting near the stove. She said that she had a suspicion it might be nitroglycerin, and she informed me that one of my men had just been in, stirring the fire, and that the sparks flew out in all directions, some of them lighting in the buckets, to be quenched in the very thin film of water floating on top of the oily liquid. "Horrors!" I said. "It _is_ nitroglycerin!" I called the man who had placed it there, and told him to take it away. As it was necessary to keep the material from freezing, he took it into the boiler-house near by. A little later, on going into the boiler-house, I saw one of the men stirring the fire, while the other was standing with his coat-tails outstretched in either hand, forming a shield to keep the sparks from flying into the nitroglycerin. It is practically impossible to make the ordinary man appreciate the necessity of care in the safe handling of explosives, and the life of the careful man is always endangered by the actions of the careless one.