E>X RichardMarjh 
IlfastmtecC liy Stanley Davi r 
lOR Heaven’s sake/’ I cried, 
“ do take care of that tin ! 
It was a treacle tin, but 
it did not contain treacle 
— no, indeed ! We did not 
quite know, Leila and I, 
what it did contain, but it 
was something awful. We got it from — 
never mind whom we got it from, but we got 
it — and it was understood to contain some- 
thing so frightful that, if properly fired, ^ it 
would shatter into nothing almost anything 
that ever was. 
So directly that treacle tin came, which 
was, in reality — though we did not breathe it 
even to ourselves — a bomb, we decided that 
it must be done at once. Melcombe should 
be blown up and burnt at once. Everything 
was ready : cards on which were stencilled 
“ Votes for Women ! ” and “ What else can a 
Woman do ? ” and— at Leila’s suggestion— 
“ This is our answer to your ‘ Cat and Mouse ’ 
Dill.” We had some shavings and some 
petrol, and other things — -in fact, everything 
had been ready some days. We had been 
waiting for the tin. 
The tin came that morning — and that 
night we did it. Leila had a summer cottage, 
and I was staying with her. Melcombe 
was sixteen miles off. We felt that it would 
not be wise to choose a place too close, though 
it was unfortunate that the roads were such 
bad ones. 1 was all right on a bicycle in any 
country, but Leila was not the slightest good 
on hills, and it was all hills between us and 
Melcombe. 
Attached to the tin was a piece of what 
seemed to be string. You lit one end, and 
sixty seconds afterwards the bomb — I mean 
the "tin — went off. The idea was that you 
should have plenty of time to get away 
before it did go off. I gathered that unless 
the string was fired nothing happened. 
There was an argument about who should 
carry the tin. I had already agreed to carry 
the shavings and the petrol and other things, 
but Leila seemed to think that I ought to be 
a sort of common carrier. We had actually 
gone thirty or forty yards before I found out 
that she had left the tin behind. I induced 
her to go back and fetch it. 
I did not enjoy that ride a little bit — we 
neither of us did. I will say this, I have not 
often ridden a longer sixteen miles. We had 
gone down to that part of the world with the 
object of doing something for the Cause ; the 
Cause wants martyrs, so Leila took that 
cottage, and I w r ent with her. It was some 
little time before we decided what to do. At 
last we hit upon Melcombe. 
Melcombe is a house. It stands in the 
centre of a sort of common ; a more cheerless, 
desolate-looking place you could hardly 
imagine. The garden had, perhaps, been a 
garden once, and the house had been unin- 
habited for years and years. It was a 
biggish house, containing, perhaps, twenty 
rooms, and remained empty, so an old woman 
in a cottage on the other side of the common 
told me, because in it the last tenant had 
murdered his wife. Directly I set eyes on it 
I said to Leila : — 
" We’ll burn this ; it’s the very thing we’re 
looking for.” 
