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EXHIBIT K.

Letter of Judge Lake giving an account of the torpedo.

SAN FRANCISCO, April 29, ’80.

Honorable STEPHEN J. FIELD.

MY DEAR SIR:  In the winter of 1866 I was in Washington attending the United States Supreme Court, and was frequently a visitor at your room.

One morning in January of that year I accompanied you to your room, expecting to find letters from San Francisco, as I had directed that my letters should be forwarded to your care.  I found your mail lying on the table.  Among other matter addressed to you was a small package, about four inches square, wrapped in white paper, and bearing the stamp of the Pioneer Photographic Gallery of San Francisco.  Two printed slips were pasted upon the face of the package and formed the address:  Your name, evidently cut from the title-page of the “California Law Reports;” and “Washington, D.C.,” taken from a newspaper.  You supposed it to be a photograph, and said as much to me, though from the first you professed surprise at the receipt of it.

You were standing at the window, when you began to open it, and had some difficulty in making the cover yield.  When you had removed the cover you raised the lid slightly, but in a moment said to me, “What is this, Lake?  It can hardly be a photograph.”  A sudden suspicion flashed upon me, and stepping to your side, I exclaimed, “Don’t open it; it means mischief!”

When I had looked at it more nearly, I said, “It’s an infernal machine” or “a torpedo.”  I carried it over to the Capitol, opposite to your rooms, where Mr. Broom, one of the clerks of the Supreme Court, joined me in the examination of your mysterious looking present.  It was put in water, and afterwards we dashed off the lid of the box by throwing it against the wall in the carriage way under the Senate steps.  About a dozen copper cartridges were disclosed—­those used in a Smith & Wesson pocket pistol, it appeared afterward—­six of them lying on each side of a bunch of friction matches in the centre.  The sides of the cartridges had been filed through, so that the burning of the matches might explode the cartridges.  The whole was kept in place in a bed of common glue, and a strip of sand-paper lying upon the heads of the matches was bent into a loop to receive the bit of thread, whose other end, secured to the clasp of the box, produced that tension and consequent pressure requisite to ignite the matches upon the forcible opening of the lid.  To make assurance doubly sure, a paste of fulminating powder and alcohol had been spread around the matches and cartridges.