Among the many billets which I have filled in America during my wandering life, I was once janitor and sweeper out of the laboratory at York College.

One day the professor was lecturing on poisions, [25] and he showed his students some alkaloid, as he called it, which he had extracted from some South American arrow poison, and which was so powerful that the least grain meant instant death.

I spotted the bottle in which this preparation was kept, and when they were all gone, I helped myself to a little of it.

I was a fairly good dispenser, so I worked this alkaloid into small, soluble pills, and each pill I put in a box with a similar pill made without the poison.
I determined at the time that when I had my chance, my gentlemen should each have a draw out of one of these boxes, while I ate the pill that remained.

It would be quite as deadly, and a good deal less noisy than firing across a handkerchief.