His lordship was unfavourable to the storing of powder because of
the danger, seeing they could, on his calculation, from the
materials lying ready for mixing, in one week prepare enough to keep
all the ordnance on the castle walls busy for two. But indeed he had
not such a high opinion of gunpowder but that he believed engines
for projection, more powerful as well as less expensive, could be
constructed, after the fashion of ballista or catapult, by the use
of a mode he had discovered of immeasurably increasing the strength
of springs, so that stones of a hundredweight might be thrown into a
city from a quarter of a mile's distance without any noise audible
to those within. It was this device he was brooding over when
Dorothy came upon him by the arblast. Nor did the conviction arise
from any prejudice against fire-arms, for he had, among many other
wonderful things of the sort, in cannons, sakers, harquebusses,
muskets, musquetoons, and all kinds, invented a pistol to discharge
a dozen times with one loading, and without so much as new priming
being once requisite, or the possessor having to change it out of
one hand into the other, or stop his horse.
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