He had engaged the services of a photographer to catch his beatitudinations. The sun was just descending the horizon, and the poet and the top of the derrick were still aglow in the radiance of sunset, while derrick and poet were enveloped in an explosive mixture of gas and air a hundred feet in diameter. The photographer had said, “Beady, look pleasant, please.” This was the moment of inspiration. The poet loosed his divine afflatus and set his fine frenzy to doing things. The following science-confounding doggerel is what he effused:—
Poetry is a divine art
And I am a poet to the heart,
And am writing these lovely lines
Right where the setting sun shines,
Just at the close of a beautiful day,
Under the milk-like Milky Way,
But which cannot be seen just yet though
Because of the sunset’s brighter glow.
Yet I know it is there, and poesy may
Raise me nearer the Milky Way.
... And it did, for at this point the poet struck a match to light a cigarette, and the explosive mixture of natural gas and air about him fired first.
When last seen the poet was headed for the Milky Way.
HOW BENDER LOWERED THE PRICE OF DYNAMITE
Once, when entering my storage magazine at Maxim, New Jersey, in which were several carloads of dynamite, along with 37,000 pounds of nitrogelatin, made to fill an order from the Brazilian Government, I saw John Bender, one of my laboring men, calmly but emphatically opening a case of dynamite with cold chisel and hammer. With some epithetitious phraseology, I dismissed him.
It was not long after this incident, when the Boniface of the inn at Farmingdale, a nearby village, called upon me to buy some dynamite. He told me that he had employed John Bender to blow the stumps out of a meadow lot. I related to him my experience with that reckless person, and tried to impress him with the fact that Bender was temperamentally so constituted as to court death, not only for himself but for others about him, when handling dynamite.