manager of the Otis Steel Works at Cleveland. He gave them the sensible advice to abandon altogether the plan of driving through gearing, and to drive each train by a separate engine, directly connected, which my high-speed engine would enable them to do. This was the first I heard of Mr. Wellman, with whom I was afterwards to have such pleasant relations. While on the subject of gearing I will state a couple of incidents. One of my first small engines I sold to Mr. Albright of Newark, a harness-maker. Half of the power of the engine was to be transmitted to an adjoining building driving a vertical shaft through a pair of miter gears. It was required that these should run noiselessly, which at 350 revolutions per minute seemed a difficult thing to accomplish. I had the gears cut in the best gear cutter I knew of, and fitted them to run in a lathe, the spindle of the driven gear running in a frame made for the purpose, and being provided with a friction wheel and brake. To make sure that the same teeth and spaces should always come together, I made a prick-punch mark on one tooth and behind the corresponding space. When started at 350 revolutions they rattled finely. The resistance of the friction brake was sufficient to make the points of contact on the teeth mark themselves well in 15 minutes’ running. I then took them down and carefully removed the bright spots on the surface with a scraper. The next time the noise was more than half gone, and four successive scrapings by a skillful workman cured it entirely. There is this encouragement in correcting gearing, that its subsequent running always tends to improve the truth of the surfaces; they wear to a more general contact. One day I had a letter from Mr. Barclay, the miller for whom I had made my first engine in Harlem, and which I arranged to drive his millstones by belting. He told me he had moved his mill from Harrison Street to a building on North Moore Street, New York, and he found there was something the matter with the engine. (In these cases there is always something the matter with the engine.) It used to drive three runs of stones, now it would only drive two, and he burned a great deal more coal than before. He wanted me to come and see what the matter was. The moment I opened the door of his mill I knew what the matter was. I heard the roar of rough gearing and was pretty mad. I told him I hoped he liked that music, for it cost him more than half the coal he was burning to keep it up. I gave him a sharp piece of my mind for changing the system of driving from that which I had provided without consulting me on the subject. I told him when he threw out his gearing and put the pulleys and belts back just as I made them, he would find the engine would give him the same power that it had done for five or six years in its old location. [Illustration: ROBERT W. HUNT]