Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 256, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 October 1910 — HENS ATE DEADLY DYNAMITE [ARTICLE]

HENS ATE DEADLY DYNAMITE

Now Their Owner Does Not Dare Go Near Them and Is Afraid to Eat Their Eggs. Winsted, Conn. —A man who has a small farm a few miles from this town does not dare to trample on a small portion of it, and is afraid to eat his own hens’ eggs. Heavy fowls he had been fattening for Thanksgiving are immune from death for the present, so far as his killing them 14 concerned. Dynamite is the cause of his trouble. He opened two one-pound sticks of the explosive, into which a little! frost had found its way, and after breaking the cylinders into pieces spread them on a flat stone in the sun to dry. He meant to use the dynamite in a lot he is clearing. When he went to get the explosive after he had drilled holes in a btg boulder, he saw a flock of his hens scratching in the dynamite, and eating it as they would eat small gravel. That’s why the farmer does not dare to eat his own hens’ eggs, for he fears particles of dynamite may lurk in the shells. “Who knows where that dynamite they ate is now?” he said, sadly. “Suppose it’s got into the shells? Think I’d run the risk of cracking one of those egg-shells? Yet how are you going to eat eggs without breaking the shells?" And there’s the story in an eggshell. The puzzled farmer cannot tell by the looks of his hens which ate the dynamite; therefore he doesn’t dare to eat any of them at Thanksgiving. As for swinging heavily on their heads with an axe he shudders at the thought.