. Nobody would buy it. The manufacturers were
afraid to handle this new and unknown kind of cotton for fear it would
not pay to work it up, and at last it had to be sold for a song to get a
trial. Such was the state of the American industry at the period when
the great republic was just born. It may be said that the nation and its
greatest product were born together, like twin children.

[Illustration: COTTON-GIN.]

The new industry grew very slowly, and the planters who were trying to
raise cotton in their fields felt much like giving it up as something
that would never pay. In fact, there was a great difficulty in the way
that gave them no end of trouble, and made the cost of cotton so great
that there was very little room for profit. For a time it looked as if
they would have to go back to corn and rice and let cotton go by the
board.

The trouble lay in the fact that in the midst of each little head of
cotton fibres, like a young bird in its nest, lay a number of seeds, to
which the fibres were closely attached. These seeds had to be got out,
and this was very slow work. It had to be done by hand, and in each
plantation store-house a group of old negroes might be seen, diligently
at work in pulling the seeds out from the fibres. Work as hard as they
could it was not easy to clean more than a pound a day, so that by the
time the crop was ready for market it had cost so much that the planter
had to be content with a very small rate of profit. Such was the state
of the cotton industry as late as 1792, when the total product was one
hundred and thirty-eight thousand pounds. In 1795 it had jumped to six
million pounds, and in 1801 to twenty million pounds. This was a
wonderful change, and it may well be asked how it was brought about.
This question brings us to our story, which we have next to tell.

In the year 1792 a bright young Yankee came down to Georgia to begin his
career by teaching in a private family. He was one of the kind who are
born with a great turn for tinkering. When he was a boy he mended the
fiddles of all the people round about, and after that took to making
nails, canes, and hat-pins. He was so handy that the people said there
was nothing Eli Whitney could not do.

But he seems to have become tired of tinkering, for he went to college
after he had grown to manhood, and from college he went to Georgia to
teach. But there he found himself too late, for another teacher had the
place which he expect