done until his report on the reissue should be received. I had entered the room expecting to receive the congratulations of every one on the bold coup by which I had saved my business. I left it unnoticed by any one. The reader will not be much surprised to learn that it was months before we heard from him again--months more of frantic helplessness. About the first of August I called at the expert’s office and was informed that he had gone on his vacation and would be absent about six weeks, and the case could not be taken up until his return. In my desperation I called upon Mr. Townsend and made to him a clean breast of our helpless condition, and offered to pledge all our stock as security for a loan of the money necessary to buy a few of the most indispensable tools. He replied to me: “Suppose the report of the expert shall be adverse and the enterprise be abandoned, what do you think your security will be worth?” I succeeded in saving one order from the wreck in rather a singular manner. This was an order from Mr. Lewis, of Cincinnati, the projector of the cottonseed-oil business, for an 18×30-inch engine to drive the machinery of their first oil-mill at Houston, Texas. I had built in Newark an engine of the same size for Senator Jones of Nevada, to drive an ice-making plant which he was establishing in the city of New Orleans. Word came to me sometime that spring that this enterprise had proved a failure, the work had been abandoned, and the engine, their only asset of value, was for sale. I instantly bought it and sent a man down to transport it to Houston and erect it there. Mr. Lewis wrote me from Cincinnati an indignant letter at my sending him a second-hand engine. I replied to him, stating first it was my only possible way of filling his order at all, as I did not know when we should be able to build an engine in our new works, and, second, that it was a new engine, having been run only a few weeks, long enough to show its excellent condition and not so long as engines are often run in public exhibitions, from which they are always sold as new. Mr. Lewis gracefully accepted my explanation, and the engine was in readiness for them to grind the coming cottonseed crop. The next summer we had a call from the agent of that mill, who had come North during their idle interval, while they were waiting for their next crop, to make his report at Cincinnati, and had come out of his way to tell us of the wonderful manner in which that engine had carried them through their first season, which he concluded by saying: “That is the engine for the cottonseed-oil business.” After he had gone I said to Mr. Merrick: “That is an old story to me; everybody says that is the engine for their business, whatever their business may happen to be.”