THE WATCHMAN’S DOUBLE VISION
My successors in the use of the dynamite plant at Maxim had in their employ a day-watchman, an all-round combination useful and useless man, his usefulness and uselessness alternating with the alternation of his sobriety and inebriety.
One morning, after a night out, he proceeded to build the fire in the laboratory stove. To start up the kindling wood, he had been in the habit of lighting a handful of shavings, and then pouring on a little kerosene from a tomato can, which he kept upon a near-by shelf.
During that night, someone—possibly one of the laboratory operatives—had placed a similar can, filled with nitroglycerin, upon the same shelf, to keep it from freezing.
In periods of convalescence from his various stages of intoxication, the watchman had before seen two cans upon that shelf or shelves, but he knew that one of them was real, and the other an hallucination. Couldn’t fool him that way!
Thinking that the hallucination would naturally be the lighter of the two cans, he took the one containing the nitroglycerin, and proceeded to pour it upon the fire.
There was so little of him left together after the explosion that, like Captain Castagnette, he died of surprise at seeing himself so dissipated.