I then sent one of my helpers, a spare man who worked for me occasionally, as he had been long connected with the manufacture and handling of explosives. I gave him the necessary money for the purchase of the material, for the hire of the team and his other expenses, and as there would be two or three dollars over, I told him he could spend that in any way he liked, for his own use and behoof. He returned along toward evening, left the horse and wagon at the stable, and started up to the works with a bag containing ten pounds of fulminate, placed in a small hand-valise. Fortunately I saw him coming soon after he had abandoned the vehicle. The road was altogether too narrow for him; the ground seemed to reel under his feet, and he was steadying himself by swinging the valise back and forth from side to side with great violence. A drunker man never walked. I took the valise away from him, and carried it to the works myself. The next day, when we opened it, we found that instructions had not been followed about wetting the fulminate. The bag of dry fulminate had, when he procured it, been merely set in a pail of water for a few minutes, and only long enough to wet a thin stratum of the explosive, leaving the whole interior perfectly dry. It is surely a wonder that the drunken man had not exploded this mass of dry fulminate in the rough handling he had given it. Had he fallen with the bag, he must almost certainly have caused an explosion by the shock of the impact of the fulminate against the ground. NITROGLYCERIN BY AUTOMOBILE At another time, I required some very pure nitroglycerin. As this material, like the fulminate of mercury, could not be transported by either freight or express, it was necessary to go and bring it over by horse and wagon, or by automobile. I decided to go and fetch it myself with my automobile, which, at that time, was a Haynes-Apperson of one of the early makes. That machine had the faculty of going wrong oftener and in more places than any other piece of machinery I ever saw or heard of. It had a very short wheel base, and, as the steering gear had worn so much that there was a good deal of lost motion, it required very great skill to keep the car in the road. No sooner would it be brought in line with the highway than it would immediately proceed toward the ditch or some wall or tree. It swayed from side to side of the road like a drunken man, and it was necessary, in order to keep it in the road at all, to calculate an average with it. As it was quite a long drive to where I was to procure the nitroglycerin, I went into New York and brought out a young chauffeur from the Haynes-Apperson Company, explaining to him fully why I wanted him, and for what I was going. I made him understand that I did not want him to start to accompany me unless he had the courage to stand by me to the end. He was all courage; bravery seemed to ooze out of him at every pore.