In this cooker I was able to roast and bake by superheated steam. Sometimes it worked very well. At other times the safety valve gave me a great deal of trouble, being altogether too uncertain in its action. One day I was sitting alone in the kitchen, steam-roasting a turkey, when dispossessed Bridget, who was waiting in an adjoining room, opened the kitchen door, and took a sly peep at me. I was endeavoring to convince her that the thing was perfectly safe, when, of a sudden, that cooker blew up. The kitchen windows were blown out, the door ripped off its hinges, and the stove demolished. Fortunately, none of the fragments found either Bridget or me. The oven portion of the cooker, containing the turkey, went upstairs somewhere, through the ceiling. Later developments showed that the turkey had gone to bed in the room over the kitchen. That cooker was my first patent. BILL BENNETT, DETECTIVE We had a neighbor, when I was a young man down in Maine, by the name of Bill Bennett, a hard-working farmer, who was very proud of his pile of dry hard wood, which he had prepared for the winter's cold. Late in the autumn, however, the wood began to disappear faster than he thought it ought. He was sure that someone was stealing it, and inasmuch as his nearest neighbors had no store of wood whatsoever, and, too, were notoriously shiftless, he concluded that they must be the pilferers. A little bit of detective work that he practiced to ascertain the truth of his conclusions was certainly ingenious and worked well. Bennett took a dozen sticks of wood, and bored a large hole in the end of each of them, which he filled with rifle powder, putting about a pound into each stick. He then plugged the holes skillfully to conceal the evidences of his work, sawing off a short bit of the plugged end of each stick, so that the plug would not show, and distributed these sticks upon the part of the pile that was shrinking. He was careful to select the wood for his own burning from another portion of the heap. The following evening he was looking from his window toward the house of the neighbors, wondering how long it would be before his ingenuity bore fruit, when suddenly there was a flash, a crash and a roar, followed by screams of "Murder!" and "Fire!" The mystery had been solved. WINNING THE OX This Bill Bennett was a good deal of a marksman, and one day while attending a county fair, where he had imbibed a considerable measure of bottled-up unsteadiness, he came reeling along to a group of men who were engaged in shooting at a target. The range was long, and the price paid by each contestant for a chance to display his skill, or lack of it, was a dollar a shot, but the prize was a fat ox, which was destined to go to the first who made a bull's-eye. As yet none had succeeded in making the lucky shot.