An editor in a large Western mining city once hit upon a happy expedient for getting rid of obnoxious callers. To this end, he filled a gunpowder keg with ashes, inserted a fuze, piled a handful of black gunpowder around it, to give the whole an air of reality, and established the arrangement on a table in his ante-room. On the advent of certain bores, the office boy followed instructions by lighting the fuze, and walking out of the room with the audible remark:

“I’m goin’ to blow up that old guy in there!”

The thing proved its worth as an automatic bouncer, until, on a memorable day, a long-haired, calf-eyed, dreamy-looking young male person came into the place, who informed the office boy that he desired to see the editor. He explained in cadenced speech that he deigned to exhibit to the editor a poetic effusion, the lucubration of a fine frenzy, fairly oozing divine afflatus, on the Surplusage of Over-Soul in Young Maidens.

On hearing his minion’s report concerning the visitor, the editor told the boy to light the fuze and to ask the poet to sit down; that the editor would see him in half an hour.

When the editor went out into the ante-room the fuze had burned out, the surface gunpowder had flashed off, but the poet was still sitting there.