The Weapon of a Coward

Feilding Star, Volume XIV, Issue 52, 18 October 1892, Page 4

The Weapon of a Coward

Beware of the yellow covered French novel. I may be a debacle such as Zola never related. The • : Anarcho-Nihilists," the latest form of co-operation, have taken to literature. They construct a box to resemble a French novel, just as chess boards are fashioned to till book cases, and porcelain to resemble prayer books in the State of Maine to smuggle whisky when stomachs are too wet with mountain dew — a matter oi " local option." Nhe novel box is filled with special powder of a 20 house blowing up power. At one corner of the volume a small cone of toughened glass screws down, communicatiog with a chemical paste round a wick. An acid is poured into the glass, which percolates through layers of bibulous paper, the number of leaves depending on the time desired for the acid to drop on the paste ; once the Greek fires meet the explosion ensues " A child can work the invention j" a Nathin^ boy has only to place the volume primed in bis coat pocket and request a porter in the vestiary of a public meeting to take charge of bis ulster, when in due time the building will come down like Sampson's pull at the temple of Dagon, and the audience be sped into mid-air as if on board a facing Mississippi steamboat.