ittle design of my own which
will astonish your friends the English, and delight my friends the
French?'

'Monsieur,' said I, 'I am in your hands. I trust the project entirely
to your skill,' and thus it came about that four days later I
substituted the bogus globe for the real one, and, unseen, dropped the
picric bomb from one of the bridges into the Seine.

On the morning of the procession I was compelled to allow Simard
several drinks of absinthe to bring him up to a point where he could
be depended on, otherwise his anxiety and determination to fling the
bomb, his frenzy against all government, made it certain that he would
betray both of us before the fateful moment came. My only fear was
that I could not stop him drinking when once he began, but somehow our
days of close companionship, loathsome as they were to me, seemed to
have had the effect of building up again the influence I held over him
in former days, and his yielding more or less to my wishes appeared to
be quite unconscious on his part.

The procession was composed entirely of carriages, each containing
four persons--two Englishmen sat on the back seats, with two Frenchmen
in front of them. A thick crowd lined each side of the thoroughfare,
cheering vociferously. Right into the middle of the procession Simard
launched his bomb. There was no crash of explosion. The missile simply
went to pieces as if it were an earthenware jar, and there arose a
dense column of very white smoke. In the immediate vicinity the
cheering stopped at once, and the sinister word 'bomb' passed from lip
to lip in awed whispers. As the throwing had been unnoticed in the
midst of the commotion, I held Simard firmly by the wrist, determined
he should not draw attention to himself by his panic-stricken desire
for immediate flight.

'Stand still, you fool!' I hissed into his ear and he obeyed
trembling.

The pair of horses in front of which the bomb fell rose for a moment
on their hind legs, and showed signs of bolting, but the coachman held
them firmly, and uplifted his hand so that the procession behind him
came to a momentary pause. No one in the carriages moved a muscle,
then suddenly the tension was broken by a great and simultaneous
cheer. Wondering at this I turned my eyes from the frightened horses
to the column of pale smoke in front of us, and saw that in some
manner it had resolved itself into a gigantic calla lily, pure white,
while from the base of this sprung the