The daily morning journal and courier., 1906-09-07
AS GOOD AS A sNARE STORY.
The Man Who Was Blown Up by Dy-
 namite and Met Parachute Coming

The Man Who Was Blown Up by Dy-
 namite and Met a Parachute Coming | Down.
 Theodore Thornton. of Mentonne. lived to the age of thirty-aye years
 without ever having had an accident of
 any kind, or a days sickness, or any
 Incident in his life that could reasona-
 ply be called an adventure, and then,
 all at once, last week had more trou- .bles and excitement crowded into few minutes than most men meet with in
 many years.
 He was coming into town from out
 in the country with a load of hay, and
 beneath the hay, on the hayrack, he
 had a box of tools belonging to a man
 who had been getting out stumps and
 doing other work on the farm There
 was quite lot of dynamite in the box, but Thornton did not know this. He Thought 1t was tools only. When pass | Ing over an obstruction the dynamite exploded beneath the hay and without i iin1uring Thornton at all, blew him up into the air fully two hundred feet, for it was an enormous charge of the ex- lposive,
 Thornton did not expect to escape With his life, but as he was about to stop going up he saw immediately above him the glitter of silk and span Igles which adorned the body and limbs of Mile. Clarissette, the famous areo- naut, who was just then descending at that place on her parachute from an ascension she had made in a hot-air balloon for the entertainment of the people at the Mentonne street fair. Mile. Clarissette saw that she and Ihornton were going to meet in mid air, and she shouted to him to keep away and not take hold of the para chute, for it would not carry double, but when they had just come together, and when Thornton felt that his up- ward flight was over and that he was about to start down again, he rtached up his hands to catch hold of the bar, Mile. Clarssette kicked vigorously at him to keep him away.
 Thornton, however. had not time for politeness, and catching the lady by one of her feet, he held on for dear l life, pulling her off from the trapeze l bar and so far down below that she was holding on with her hands and thus supporting them both, while the parachute shot down with dangerous sWiftness, the air whistling shriIly I through the center opening
 The hay had caught fire from the ex- plosion, and huge volume of black smoke was rising like a tower into the sky, and into this cloud Thornton and the aeronaut settled and disappeared. | but, they had no sooner done so, the shrill French shrieks of Mile Clarts-
 sette sounding far over the surround ling country, than the parachute also | jreached the ascending current of hot air and was lifted again, waited away
 to one side and Immediately settled with it's double burden in the rush. ing river below the bridge and only a | few rods above the falls
 The swift current caught thief and
 hurried them onward toward the dead lily plunge on to the rocks below. all
 their desperate struggles to stem the 1 tide being of no avail, and then over
 the brink they went But just here the
 parachute, to which they both haa
 chunk, came into play again, and,
 buoying them up in the fall lowered
 them safely into the foaming pool be. low, from which they were soon res- icued by men in boats.-St. Louis Pa { public,