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A blowpipe, a bit of candle, a small bottle of powdered borax, another of mercury, and a bent platinum wire, packed away in an empty jam-tin, formed his assayer's kit a paraphernalia which induced as much mirth and scoffing contempt from Palmer Billy as it would have done from a skilled and cultured scientist, who, without hair-balances, acids, retorts, and a dozen other appliances, would have scorned the idea of an analysis or anything approaching it.

The carriage consisted of two uprights on a base, with mortar between them and pointing up at an angle of about forty-five degrees. The charge was little packets of gunpowder tied up in paper in measured doses. The bomb was a tin-can an empty jam-tin, mostly filled with a bursting charge and fragments of metal, and with an inch or so of the fuse protruding.

The ransacking of his hut revealed a magazine of riches, the earthen floor beneath the bunk being honeycombed with pits containing easily portable but valuable property. In a jam-tin were several nuggets, among them the very specimen which Bill Haddon had given to Mrs. Sinclair, landlady of the Carriers' Arms a plane of crystal from which rose a wonderfully true pyramid of gold.

Dan, on opening out the tucker-bags, announced ruefully that our supply of meat had "turned on us"; and as our jam-tin had "blown," we feared we were reduced to damper only, until the Maluka unearthed a bottle of anchovy paste, falsely labelled "Chicken and Ham." "Lot's wife," Dan called it, after "tackling some as a relish."

Instruction was given in the use of bombs, of which the men had hitherto no knowledge. In those days the bomb first in use was the jam-tin bomb. The men were taught how to cut fuses, fix them into the detonator, attach the lighter and wire the whole together preparatory for use against the enemy.

So far as we have mastered the mysteries of the craft, there appear to be four types of bomb in store for us or rather, for Brother Bosche. They are: The hair-brush. The cricket-ball. The policeman's truncheon. The jam-tin. The hair-brush is very like the ordinary hair-brush, except that the bristles are replaced by a solid block of high-explosive.

Can you exterminate twenty Germans in a fortified back-parlour by a single thrust with a bayonet? Never! But you can do both these things with a jam-tin stuffed with dynamite and scrap-iron. So the bomb has come to its own, and has brought with it certain changes tactical, organic, and domestic. From being a mere super, he has become a star.

"Come and see my distillery," he said, when breakfast was over, "I fixed it up last night." Hugh had set the bronchitis-kettle always carried about with Baby, who was subject to croup on the fire-place, and had fixed a long narrow jam-tin on to the end of the spout.

One morning he was summarily marched into the presence of the big loud-voiced man whose orders were obeyed with instant smartness, who told him, to his amazement and despair, that he must depart with his property. the seals of a sack were broken before him, and its contents displayed and duly accounted for a sleeping-mat, a small red blanket, the elastic-side boots, two scrolls of sinfully painted silk, a hard round hat stuffed with gaudy handkerchiefs, three watches and varied jewellery in a ginger-jar, the quaintly carved toilet devices, the jam-tin full of nuggets, and a chamois-leather bag delusively heavy with fine gold.

During the night Lieut. W. Beckett reported some activity in No-man's Land in front of "A" Company and invited the bombers to try their hand. Now the bombers had received their first introduction to their precarious weapons only 24 hours previously, when they took over from the 7th H.L.I. a Garland mortar, a trench catapult and various crude jam-tin and canister bombs of sinister aspect.