any, one hundred and forty-two miles away, in thirty-two
hours. This was at the rate of four and a half miles an hour. It was not
many years before steamboats were running on all our rivers.

That is all I shall say here about the steamboat, for there is another
story of invention I wish to tell you before I close. This is about the
cotton fibre, which you know is the great product of the Southern
States.

The cotton plant when ripe has a white, fluffy head, and a great bunch
of snow-white fibres, within which are the seeds. In old times these had
to be taken out by hand, and it was a whole day's work for a negro to
get the seeds out of a pound of the cotton. This made cotton so dear
that not much of it could be sold. In 1784 eight bags of it were sent to
Liverpool, and the custom-house people there seized it for duties. They
said it must have been smuggled from some other country, for the United
States could not have produced such a "prodigious quantity."

A few years afterwards a young man named Eli Whitney went South to teach
in a private family, but before he got there some one else had his
situation, and he was left with nothing to do. Mrs. Greene, the widow of
General Greene, who fought so well in the Revolution, took pity on him
and gave him a home in her house. He paid her by fixing up things about
her house. She found him so handy that she asked him if he could not
invent a machine to take the seeds out of the cotton. Whitney said he
would try, and he set himself to work. It was not long before he had a
machine made which did the work wonderfully well. This machine is known
as the "cotton-gin," or cotton engine, for gin is short for engine. On
one side of it are wires so close together that the seeds cannot get
through. Between them are circular saws which catch the cotton and draw
it through, while the seeds pass on.

The machine was a simple one, but it acted like magic. A hundred negroes
could not clean as much cotton in a day as one machine. The price of
cotton soon went down and a demand for it sprang up. In 1795, when the
cotton gin was made, only about 500,000 pounds of cotton were produced
in this country. By 1801 this had grown to 20,000,000 pounds. Now it has
grown to more than 12,000,000 bales, of nearly 500 pounds each. This is
sold to foreign countries and is worked in our own mills at home, being
made into millions of yards of cloth of many kinds to clothe the people
of the earth. All this come