A contractor, who does business up in New York State, told me the following story:

A carload of nitroglycerin dynamite had been shipped to him, but was held up in a freight-house for a day or two before delivery to him. One night while it was there, the freight-house took fire. Hearing the fire-alarm and looking out, he was astounded to see that it was the freight-house burning. Believing that his carload of dynamite would be sure to explode, he started to run to the scene in all haste, to warn the firemen and others to keep far away from the inevitable explosion, when, suddenly, there was a great burst of flame, which shot high into the sky and flared out bright and wild in all directions, sending up an enormous column of smoke. But this fierce combustion lasted only a few minutes, and then subsided.

He knew that his dynamite had burned up, and, curiously enough, without exploding.

He met the fire chief after the conflagration, and they spoke of the fire. The chief remarked that there must have been some very combustible freight on one of the cars. He said that, when the fire first started, the firemen played a full stream of water on this car, but it did not do any good. The car burned so fast and so fierce that they had to rush away for their lives, or they would have been consumed by the intense heat, and he wondered what it could be that would burn so fiercely.

When told that it was a carload of dynamite, he felt like a man who discovers the next day that he had, during the night, walked along the sheer edge of a high precipice.

Although dynamite in such quantities as a carload when ignited is almost certain to explode instead of merely burning, still, sometimes, even that quantity will take fire and burn up completely without exploding; while, at other times, a single stick of dynamite when ignited will detonate.