The mule, hearing the sizzing of the fuze, began to rear and snort and kick and whirl about, while the officer and his men scudded to cover, and flattened themselves out upon the ground. They had not long to wait when there was a terrific crash. The gun had exploded under the overcharge, with the utter demolition of the mule carriage. The Indians, hearing the report, looked quickly about them, and seeing the fragments of an exploded mule rocketing through the air, were frightened nearly out of their wits, and fled precipitately. HOW GUSSIE GOT LOADED When I was a young man I taught several terms of school in Maine, where, in the small country districts, the teacher is expected to be a walking encyclopedia of information. One day there came a loud knock upon the door of the schoolhouse. On going out to see what was the cause of the imperative summons, I found standing there the wife of one of the neighbors, white as a sheet with agitation and alarm. She excitedly told me that her little boy, Gussie, had just swallowed a bullet, and she asked me what she should do for him. "Why," said I pleasantly, "Give him a good charge of gunpowder. But be careful not to point him toward anybody." She went home and gave him a dose of gunpowder, without ever seeing the joke. DYNAMITE'S FREAK A contractor, who does business up in New York State, told me the following story: A carload of nitroglycerin dynamite had been shipped to him, but was held up in a freight-house for a day or two before delivery to him. One night while it was there, the freight-house took fire. Hearing the fire-alarm and looking out, he was astounded to see that it was the freight-house burning. Believing that his carload of dynamite would be sure to explode, he started to run to the scene in all haste, to warn the firemen and others to keep far away from the inevitable explosion, when, suddenly, there was a great burst of flame, which shot high into the sky and flared out bright and wild in all directions, sending up an enormous column of smoke. But this fierce combustion lasted only a few minutes, and then subsided. He knew that his dynamite had burned up, and, curiously enough, without exploding. He met the fire chief after the conflagration, and they spoke of the fire. The chief remarked that there must have been some very combustible freight on one of the cars. He said that, when the fire first started, the firemen played a full stream of water on this car, but it did not do any good. The car burned so fast and so fierce that they had to rush away for their lives, or they would have been consumed by the intense heat, and he wondered what it could be that would burn so fiercely. When told that it was a carload of dynamite, he felt like a man who discovers the next day that he had, during the night, walked along the sheer edge of a high precipice.