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BUSINESS SLOWING DOWN. Bank Run Follows Laying Off of Four Thousand Near Buffalo. [By Telegraph to The Tribune.] Buffalo, Nov. 16.-About four thousand men were laid off at the Lackawanna Steel Company's plant in West Seneca to-night. Only two thousand men remain-just enough to run the company's four small mills that will fill present orders. Then if no new business comes in these. too, will be laid off. The steel company's action is believed to be responsible indirectly for a small run made on the Buffalo Savings Bank to-day, a run which was still on when the bank closed at noon. The run was started by Polish depositors, presumably men who were employed at the steel plant and who had word that they were going to be laid off. Rumors spread in the Pollsh section of the city alarmed other citizens, and there were withdrawals from other banks, all of which, including the Buffalo Savings Bank, are rated as sound financial institutions. Malden, Mass., Nov. 16.--Notices were posted today in the factories of the Boston Rubber Shoe Company in this city and Melrose, announcing that the plants would close next Saturday. Three thousand employes will be thrown out of work. The Malden factory will be closed for ten days, while that at Melrose is not expected to resume operations before January 1. Overproduction is given by the officials of the company as the reason for the shutdown. New Bedford, Mass., Nov. 16.-All the mills of the New England Cotton Yarn Company in this city and in Taunton were idle to-day. The stringency in the money market and the inability of jobbers to pay for the goods manufactured by the mills are given as the cause of the temporary shutdown. It is understood that the mills will run five days a week for the present. The company employs about five thousand hands. A prominent mill treasurer said to-night: "The whole trouble is due to the great prosperity of the country and the present, perhaps temporary, lack of cash with which to transact such an enormous business. The concerns to which we sell goods have not the ready money to meet payments. We cannot afford to go ahead and pay the high price of labor and materials and pile up these goods on the prospect of ultimately disposing of them. The only alternative is to curtail production and wait until the jobbers and wholesale houses shall be able to get money again." Sanford. Me., Nov. 16.-Notices were posted in the Sanford Plush Mills to-day announcing that beginning on Monday next the plant will be operated only three days a week. Eleven hundred hands are affected.