The President, who was sitting next the window, prudently muffled his features in the curtain. The others drew back as far as they could—about six inches—and waited.
Nothing happened.
"I am sure it will work all right," declared the inventor desperately. "Perhaps the temperature of this fire——"
He knelt down, and began to blow upon the flickering coals. There was a long and triumphant sniff from Master Ashley.
"I said it was only a rotten stinkp—" he began.
There is a special department of Providence which watches over the youthful chemist. The explosion killed no one, though it blew the coals out of the grate and the pictures off the walls.
The person who suffered most was the inventor. He was led, howling but triumphant, to the Sanatorium.
"Luckily, sir," explained Rumford to Mr. Bull a few days later, in answer to a kindly inquiry as to the extent of the patient's injuries, "it was only his face."