(Signed) "REPRESENTATIVE OF GENERAL STAFF." And thereafter American railway bridges and embankments were safe, though their owners may not have been aware of the fact at the time. It is no mere metaphor to say that during 1915 and 1916 the smoke of German explosions in factories in the United States was spreading across the sun, casting the deepening shadow of war over America. There was dynamite found in the coal tender of a munitions train on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Callery Junction, Pa., on December 10, 1915, the day on which enormous quantities of wheat were destroyed by fire in grain elevators at Erie. A few hours earlier a two-million-dollar explosion had occurred at the Hopewell plant of the du Pont works. Shortly before Christmas a ton and a half of nitroglycerine exploded at Fayville, Illinois. During 1916 there were a dozen major explosions in the du Pont properties alone and literally dozens of lives were lost. Two arms plants at Bridgeport, Conn., were blown up. An explosion in May wiped out a large chemical plant in Cadillac, Michigan. A munitions works of the Bethlehem Steel Company at Newcastle, Pa., was destroyed. The climax in violence came, however, in the sultry night of August 1-2. Shortly after midnight the rocky island of Manhattan trembled, and the roar of a prodigious blast burst over the harbor of New York. Two million pounds of munitions were being transported in freight trains and on barges near the island of Black Tom, a few hundred yards from the Bartholdi Statue of Liberty. Some one, somehow, supplied the spark. The loss of life was inconsiderable, for that neighborhood was not inhabited, but the confusion was complete. Heavy windows in the canyons of lower Manhattan were shivered, and for a few moments many of the streets rained broken glass. Shell-laden barges near the original explosion set up a scattering fire which continued for some time, most of the projectiles losing their power through lack of a substantial breech-block. But the immigration station on Ellis Island was in panic, and its position became more unpleasant as one of the blazing barges drifted down upon it. The shock was felt far out in Jersey, and northward in Connecticut. An estimate of damage was placed at thirty millions of dollars, probably as accurate as such an estimate need be; the event was utterly spectacular, and from the point of view of the unknown destroying agent, effective.