Also, I brought several cotton bosom-shirts, several cotton undershirts, half-a-dozen handkerchiefs, a couple of towels, half-a-dozen pairs of cotton socks, and as many cheap cotton collars and cuffs. These I had immersed in a concentrated mixture of nitric and sulphuric acids, converting them all into guncotton. Then I washed and soaked the acid out of them, and dried them. I stretched a clothes-line from the speaker's platform to a distance of about thirty feet to my right, and on this I hung my guncotton clothes, only a few feet away from the front of the audience. There were, perhaps, a thousand people massed in front of me, crowding up close, that nothing should miss them. I made a brief talk on the nature and use of explosives, and burned some smokeless powder under water, and then I touched off the dynamite in the rear of the field, which made a very pretty showing. The audience was very curious about that wash. That I should have hung my linen out to dry on that occasion they thought was very peculiar taste, to say the least; and some of them did not hesitate to say that they considered it very bad taste. I then said to the audience that I must beg their pardon for displaying my underwear as I had done; that I appreciated the fact that it was an unsightly display, and, to accommodate them, I would immediately proceed to get it out of sight. I then touched it off with an electrical igniter, and that laundry disappeared in one great bright flash of flame. There happened to be in my audience an ingenious fellow with some knowledge of chemistry, who was a noted wag and practical joker. Taking the hint from my nitrated laundry, he nitrated a cotton handkerchief and sent it to the Chinese laundry with the rest of his wash. When he called for his clothes, he found John Chinaman with his right arm in a sling. However, John was all smiles, and apologized for the absence of the one handkerchief, but said nothing more about it. A short time after the fellow had put on his clean underwear, he developed a very severe case of prickly heat, followed, a little later, by a sensation like that of needles being stuck into his body over the entire surface. Anyone who has taken a bite of a wild Indian turnip knows what that sensation is. The Chinaman had charged his customer's garments with a preparation extracted from a Chinese variant of the Indian turnip. It took a couple of weeks, with the aid of a physician, for the wag to recover from the little unpleasantness which the Chinaman had inflicted upon him. THE FRIGHTENED FISHERMAN When testing big guns at Sandy Hook, the officers are often greatly annoyed by fishing boats that persist in getting within range of the guns and in remaining there, entirely regardless of the work or wishes of the officers of Uncle Sam.