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To feed these bonfires, everything combustible which could be begged or stolen from the neighboring villages, farm-houses, and fences is put in requisition.
Such, for instance, was one of the mistakes committed in the celebrated phlogistic theory; a doctrine which accounted for combustion by the extrication of a substance called phlogiston, supposed to be contained in all combustible matter.
Their weapons of war were lances and the formidable bolas, by means of which, used as slings, they could send stones to a great distance, and combustible materials, with which they set fire to the Spanish houses.
"Oh!" said Des Hermies, "many a woman would be happy to wreathe with laurel the occiput of so combustible a sexagenarian. Look at that! Isn't it revolting?" pointing to the walls covered with posters. It was a veritable debauch of placards. Everywhere on lurid coloured paper in box car letters were the names of Boulanger and Jacques. "Thank God, this will be over tomorrow."
The trade gradually increased, until we find as many as 150 pots and kettles cast in a week. An abundance of coals existed in the neighbourhood: by rejecting those of inferior quality, and coking the others with great care, a combustible was obtained better fitted even than charcoal itself for the fusion of that particular kind of ore which is found in the coal-measures.
But such combustible material could not be smothered long. The smell of burning soon reached one of the marines stationed on the lower-deck, who instantly gave the alarm; but almost before the words had passed his lips the flames burst forth. "Fire! fire! fire!" What a scene ensued! There was confusion at first, for no sound at sea rings so terribly in the ear as the shout of "Fire!"
Then the gunner took his keys from their appointed place outside the door of the captain's cabin and went below to open the magazines in the flat appropriated to their combustible contents, in company with a working party to attend to the ammunition hoists; while the marine artillerymen and crews of the main-deck battery and upper-deck machine- guns hurried to their stations under charge of "Gunnery Jack," the lieutenant whose special function was to see to our little barkers.
The reason is that the combustible state is natural for sulphur, but not for phosphorus, the latter's natural state being the oxidized one. For what matters here is just how the particular substance behaves at that level of temperature on which the earth unfolds her normal planetary activity.
It was some combustible matter that blazed up fiercely, sending huge volumes of flames out of the door and lighting up the courtyard, which was now occupied only by American troopers. The cattle-thieves had behaved just as they did when Bob Owens so gallantly attacked a portion of their number at the squatter's cabin.
Sometimes the doctor wrought himself into a prophetic fury, raving through the length and breadth of the dwelling, snatching firebrands and flinging them about him, to the terror of the squaws, with whom, in their combustible tenements, fire was a constant bugbear.
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