nning,
while the engine is placed in the connecting building. The pickers and
the boilers are in outside buildings, so placed that they will not
interfere with future extensions of the building into the form of the
block letter H.

FIRE APPARATUS.

All methods for the prevention of fires fall so far short of the ideal
of immunity that there is a necessity for fire-apparatus. The principle
of the defence of a manufactory against fire is that of self-protection,
by making the installation and management of the fire-apparatus equal to
the progress of any fire which can possibly occur.

Fire-apparatus should be kept in service as well as in order. It is no
exception to any other machinery, in that practice is essential to
obtain any efficient results.

The practical results of private fire-organizations, where fire has
occurred, have been very marked; and systematic and skilful work has
been the rule, in place of the needless confusion and liability to
breakage of the apparatus, which almost inevitably occurs in the lack of
such organization.

The details differ with the arrangements and administration of every
mill; but the general policy of definitely assigning persons to the
positions for which they are best adapted, and where it is presumed they
could be most useful, and to practice them in such work, is a rule which
is common to all.

A great deal of fire-apparatus is destroyed by freezing water during the
winter months, and therefore a special inspection of all such apparatus
should be made late in the autumn, when the water should be drained from
all portions of the system where there is liability of freezing, and all
hydrants and valves should be well oiled, preferably with mineral oil.
The hazard from a hydrant or other portion of the apparatus broken by
frost, does not lie so much in the probability that disadvantage may
result from the disuse of one element of the plant, as in the liability
that such a breakage may interfere with the whole system and render it
inoperative.

Buckets of water are the most effective fire-apparatus. They should be
kept full, and distributed in liberal profusion in the various rooms of
a mill, being placed on shelves or hung on hooks, as circumstances may
require. In order to assist in keeping them for fire purposes only, they
should be unlike other pails used about the premises, and in some
instances each pail and the wall or column behind its position bears the
same numb