Handling Deadly Explosives.
Operatives, girls in many cases, handle the most terrible compounds. We stop, for example, where they are making primers to go in the head of your loaded shell, in order that it may not miss fire when the bunch of quail whirrs suddenly into the air from the sheltering grasses. That grayish, pasty mass is wet fulminate of mercury. Suppose it should dry a trifle too rapidly. It would be the last thing you ever did suppose, for there is force enough in that double handful to blow its surroundings into fragments. You edge away a little, and no wonder, but the girl who handles it shows no fear as she deftly but carefully presses it into molds which separate it into the proper sizes for primers. She knows that in its present moist condition it cannot explode.
Extreme Precautions.
Or, perhaps, we may be watching one of the many loading machines. There is a certain suggestiveness in the way the machines are separated by partitions. The man in charge takes a small carrier of powder from a case in the outside wall and shuts the door, then carefully empties it into the reservoir of his machine, and watches alertly while it packs the proper portions into the waiting shells. He looks like a careful man, and needs to be. You do not stand too close.