The first table covers were great curiosities, and the homes of the Baileys were visited by all the neighboring housewives, who were anxious to see "how they worked." Of course, it was easy to keep them clean, and they saved the woodwork of the table, which was recommendation enough. To see a cloth was to covet it, and it was not long before Ezekiel Bailey had a considerable business. Employing a boy to help him, he turned out table cloths as fast as his limited facilities would permit, and, as he progressed, new ideas for decorating took shape in his mind. In less than a year he had men out on the road selling them. The turning out to perfection of an oilcloth carpet in those days was a task that would make a person in these piping times of labor-saving machinery wish for something easier. All the smoothing or rubbing down was done by hand. Heavy, long-bladed knives, as big as the "Sword of Bunker Hill," were used to scrape down the rough body coats of paint, and a smooth surface, on which to stamp the geometrical figures in colors, was fetched after long and laborious polishing with bricks and pumice stone. Drummers employed by Mr. Bailey traveled to Massachusetts, to New York, and away down into the South, and ere long the demand for oilcloth carpeting became so general that other factories were built and made to chatter and clank with the new industry. There was living not far from East Winthrop at this time a shrewd, wideawake Yankee farmer named Sampson, who had kept his weather eye peeled on the progress of Ezekiel Bailey, and when housewives everywhere began to yearn for the new carpeting, taking a neighbor in as a partner, Mr. Sampson built a factory, and in a very short time was in a position to be considered a formidable rival of Mr. Bailey. But the originator of the oilcloth carpet was not to be outdone. Discerning good returns from a plant established close to a big center of consumption, Mr. Bailey entered into a deal with New Jersey capitalists, and a big factory was set a-going in that State. A trusted employe of the Bailey concern, Levi Richardson (who still lives and is the proprietor of a modest little store in East Winthrop), was sent to New Jersey to instruct the green hands there in the art of manufacture. While thus engaged, Mr. Richardson's brain was busy with the problem of labor saving, and one day a phantom device for smoothing and rubbing down the first rough coats on the burlaps took form in his mind, and for some weeks he spent his spare time in experimenting. The result was the present patent used in most factories, whereby as much rubbing down can be done in one day as could have been accomplished in four by the old hand method. --Industrial World. * * * * * THE KOPPEL ELECTRIC LOCOMOTIVES. The question of the design of small locomotives for use on pioneer lines has been always a difficult matter.