e editor on his
knees, a piece of chalk in his hand, and parts of a plough
by his side, making drawings on the floor, and trying to
explain something to a plough-maker beside him. The editor
looked up at his visitor, and an expression of relief
replaced the perplexity on his face.

"Cornell," he cried, "you're the very man I want to see. I
want a scraper made, and I can't make Robinson here see
into my idea. You can understand it, and make it for me,
too."

"What is your scraper to do?" asked Cornell.

Mr. Smith, the editor, rose from his knees and explained. A
line of telegraph was to be built from Baltimore to
Washington. Congress had granted the money. He had taken the
contract from Professor Morse to lay the tube in which the
wire was to be placed. He had made a bad bargain, he feared.
The job was going to cost more than he had calculated, on.
He was trying to invent something that would dig the ditch,
and fill in the dirt again after the pipe was laid. Cornell
listened to him, questioned him, found out the size of the
pipe and the depth of the ditch, then sat down and passed
some minutes in hard thinking. Finally he said,--

"You are on the wrong tack. You don't want either a ditch or
a scraper."

He took a pencil and in a few minutes outlined a machine,
which he said would cut a trench two feet deep, lay the pipe
at its bottom, and cover the earth in behind it. The motive
power need be only a team of oxen or mules. These creatures
had but to trudge slowly onward. The machine would do its
work faithfully behind them.

"Come, come, this is impossible!" cried editor Smith.

"I'll wager my head it can be done, and I can do it,"
replied inventor Cornell.

He laid a large premium on his confidence in his idea,
promising that if his machine would not work he would ask
no money for it. But if it succeeded, he was to be well
paid. Smith agreed to these terms, and Cornell went to work.

In ten days the machine was built and ready for trial. A
yoke of oxen was attached to it, three men managed it, and
in the first five minutes it had laid one hundred feet of
pipe and covered it with earth. It was a decided success.
Mr. Smith had contracted to lay the pipe for one hundred
dollars a mile. A short calculation proved to him that, with
the aid of Ezra Cornell's machine, ninety dollars of this
would be profit.

But the shrewd editor did not feel like risking Cornell's
machine in any hands but those of the invent