In payment of your bill please find inclosed draft, etc. Please insert our advertisement every other week hereafter. We are compelled to this being overrun with orders. Unless they hold up we shall be obliged to withdraw it entirely. So much for the advantages of your medium for advertising.

C.W. Le Count, Manufacturer of lathe dogs and steam engine governors, South Norwalk, Conn., writes concerning his advertisement in these columns:

What business I have I can trace three-quarters of it directly to your journal.

An agent of the Hinkley Knitting Machine Co., whose invention was illustrated in these columns some weeks ago, writes:

It is now but ten days since its publication, yet without a single advertisement in any paper I have been obliged to engage extra assistance to simply inclose my circulars to parties, who are writing and even telegraphing for agencies and machines, while many have traveled long distances to personally engage agencies. The Superintendent of the Company makes similar complaints.


HUNT'S IMPROVED STEAM PACKING PISTON.

Engineers are aware that there are more or less objections to the use of the ordinary spring pistons, owing to the changing tension of the springs, the necessity of frequent adjustment, and the impossibility of the packing rings adapting themselves to the varying pressures of the steam on the piston. A number of attempts have been made to produce a self packing or steam expanding piston, which will act always with the pressure of the steam and the velocity of the engine. The advantages of such a piston will be readily appreciated by practical engineers, especially drivers of locomotives, working, as they nearly all do, at a very high pressure of steam. The general complaint against the several packings in use on our railroads is, that they "pack too tight," and rapidly wear out the rings, while the only remedy has been, the extremely uncertain one of contracting the openings by which steam is admitted under the ring, or rings, to expand them. The obvious objection to such an arrangement is, that it allows the steam to act on the rings with its full force during slow motion, as when a train is starting, while if effective under any circumstances, it will be so only at comparatively high piston speed. The efficacy of such a remedy, if it possesses any, is in fact inversely as the piston speed.