ph 135.]

[Footnote 2: The house is no longer standing, and the door has
disappeared.]

[Footnote 3: Chores: getting in wood, feeding cattle, etc.]

176. What Eli Whitney used to do in his father's little workshop;
the fiddle.--Eli Whitney's father used that little wooden building
as a kind of workshop, where he mended chairs and did many other small
jobs. Eli liked to go to that workshop and make little things for
himself, such as water-wheels and windmills; for it was as natural
for him to use tools as it was to whistle.

Once when Eli's father was gone from home for several days, the boy
was very busy all the while in the little shop. When Mr. Whitney came
back he asked his housekeeper, "What has Eli been doing?" "Oh," she
replied, "he has been making a fiddle." His father shook his head,
and said that he was afraid Eli would never get on much in the world.
But Eli's fiddle, though it was rough-looking, was well made. It had
music in it, and the neighbors liked to hear it: somehow it seemed
to say through all the tunes played on it, "_Whatever is worth doing,
is worth doing well._"

177. Eli Whitney begins making nails; he goes to college.--When Eli
was fifteen, he began making nails. We have machines to-day which
will make more than a hundred nails a minute; but Eli made his, one
by one, by pounding them out of a long, slender bar of red-hot iron.
Whitney's hand-made nails were not handsome, but they were strong
and tough, and as the Revolutionary War was then going on, he could
sell all he could make.

After the war was over the demand for nails was not so good. Then
Whitney threw down his hammer, and said, "I am going to college."
He had no money; but he worked his way through Yale College, partly
by teaching and partly by doing little jobs with his tools. A
carpenter who saw him at work one day, noticed how neatly and
skilfully he used his tools, and said, "There was one good mechanic
spoiled when you went to college."

178. Whitney goes to Georgia; he stops with Mrs. General Greene; the
embroidery frame.--When the young man had completed his course of
study he went to Georgia to teach in a gentleman's family. On the
way to Savannah he became acquainted with Mrs. Greene, the widow of
the famous General Greene[4] of Rhode Island. General Greene had done
such excellent fighting in the south during the Revolution that,
after the war was over, the state of Georgia gave him a large piece
of land near S