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They imagined the world to be flat and round, like a trencher, and they in the middest. After this they brought him a bagge of gunpowder, which they carefully preserved till the next spring, to plant as they did their corne, because they would be acquainted with the nature of that seede.
The sun was already sinking towards the west, when I heard the captain exclaim, "Here they come! Now, my lads, let's see what you are made of." We all, on this, gave a loud cheer, and I could see six or eight dark specks just stealing out clear of the land. Charley and I were in high glee at the near prospect of a skirmish, for we both of us had a great fancy for smelling gunpowder.
"Oh!" said Jack, "I found it easy to follow the sound of the Dragoons' horses they made such a clatter over the stones when flying from the Highlandmen. Another asked him how he, a blind man, durst venture upon such a service; to which Metcalf replied, that had he possessed a pair of good eyes, perhaps he would not have come there to risk the loss of them by gunpowder.
"Once, when I first knew this region, many thousand warriors, with their squaws and children, were masters here," observed old Moggs. "But they are all gone; the white man's gunpowder, and his still more deadly fire-water, have carried off the greater number.
The great velocities and the most uniform pressures by the use of smokeless powder have been attained with this Palliser bullet. A great many stories have been told about the noiselessness of smokeless powder. But there is no such thing as a noiseless gunpowder.
The popular belief that he was the inventor of gunpowder had its origin in two passages in his treatise "On the Secret Works of Art and Nature, and on the Nullity of Magic," in one of which he describes some of its qualities, while in the other he apparently conceals its composition under an enigma.
Squire Headlong caught with avidity at this suggestion, and as he had always a store of gunpowder in the house, he insisted on commencing operations immediately.
When we had done this, we carried them all together to the idol: when we came there we fell to work with him; and first we daubed him all over, and his robes also, with tar, and such other stuff as we had, which was tallow mixed with brimstone; then we stopped his eyes, and ears, and, mouth full of gunpowder; then we wrapped up a great piece of wildfire in his bonnet; and then sticking all the combustibles we had brought with us upon; him, we looked about to see if we could find any thing else to help to burn him; when my Scotsman remembered that by the tent, or hut, where the men were, there lay a heap of dry forage, whether straw or rushes I do not remember: away he and the other Scotsman ran, and fetched their arms full of that.
He started running over, in his mind, the paratemporal areas in which gunpowder but not the percussion-cap was known. Expanding cultures, which had progressed as far as the former but not the latter. Static cultures, in which an accidental discovery of gunpowder had never been followed up by further research. Post-debacle cultures, in which a few stray bits of ancient knowledge had survived.
At Voralberg in the Tyrol, on the first Sunday in Lent, a slender young fir-tree is surrounded with a pile of straw and firewood. To the top of the tree is fastened a human figure called the "witch," made of old clothes and stuffed with gunpowder.
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