Once the matron gave me simply a vile lozenge for my throat, which got a bit foggy owing to falling into the water during “hare and hounds.” Well, the lozenge was white in color, but even a white lozenge may be very decent sometimes, so I took a shot at it going to bed. But it was so jolly frightful to the taste that I chucked it away, and next morning found it again and examined it after drying. On it I then found the words “Chlorate of potash.” So I took it to Nubbs. He said it was certainly a chemical, and added that the stuff in it was almost the same as you make “Pharaoh’s serpents” with. I could hardly believe such a thing, so he lighted the lozenge and it burned blue, and a long, wriggling, brownish ash came curling out of it like a snake, just as Nubby said, which is well worth knowing to anybody who ever has a chlorate of potash lozenge. Many such like remarkable and useful things Nubby could tell you; among others, how to mix sulphur and gunpowder and other ingredients for fireworks. He had, in fact, an awful fine book devoted to the subject, and wooden affairs to load cases; and once when Stoddart didn’t turn up and the Doctor put us on our honor to do the proper things in the laboratory alone, Nubbs finished off analyzing some mess in about five minutes, and spent the complete rest of the time making a rocket. It had four blue stars and thirteen yellow ones, and the case was made out of a stiff brown paper roll in which his mother had that morning sent Nubbs a photograph of her new baby at home. And Nubbs forgot the photograph and stuffed the mixture in upon it, and made a separate compartment for the stars on top. So the photograph of Nubby’s mother’s new baby, curiously enough, went off with the rocket, and was never more seen by mortal eye. Not that Nubbs cared. He kept the rocket till the Doctor’s birthday, and after prayers, when he knew he was in his study, with the windows open and the blinds up, being summer-time, Nubbs let it off in the front garden, and we helped. It turned out very good in a way, though not quite a perfect rocket, because instead of going up it tore along the ground. But it tore for an enormous distance, and then turned and came back all of itself. And the blue stars did not go off, but the yellow ones did--or some--in a bed of rather swagger geraniums, unfortunately. The Doctor didn’t care much about it, not understanding our motives. But Nubbs explained that he had done it out of honor to the day. Then the Doctor thanked him, and said he had doubtless meant well, and that from the earliest times of the Chinese the pyrotechnist’s art had been employed upon occasions of legitimate festivity and rejoicing.