if he could do anything with
it.

The young inventor lost no time. This was something much more to his
liking than poring over the dry books of the law, and he went to work
with enthusiasm. He went into the fields and studied the growing cotton.
Then he watched the seed-pickers at their work. Taking specimens of the
ripe cotton-boll to his room, he studied the seeds as they lay cradled
in the fibre, and saw how they were fastened to it. To get them out
there must be some way of dragging them apart, pulling the fibres from
the seed and keeping them separate.

The inventor studied and thought and dreamed, and in a very short time
his quick genius saw how the work could be done. And he no sooner saw it
than he set to work to do it. The idea of the cotton-gin was fully
formed in his mind before he had lifted his hand towards making one.

It was not easy, in fact. It is often a long road between an inventor's
first idea and a machine that will do all he wants it to. And he had
nothing to work with, but had to make his own tools and manufacture his
own wire, and work upward from the very bottom of things.

In a few months, however, he had a model ready. Mrs. Greene was so
interested in his work and so proud of his success that she induced him
to show the model and explain its working to some of her planter
friends, especially those who had induced him to engage in the work.
When they saw what he had done, and were convinced of the truth of what
he told them,--that they could clean more cotton in a day by his machine
than in many months by the old hand-picking way,--their excitement was
great, and the report of the wonderful invention spread far and wide.

Shall we say here what this machine was like? The principle was simple
enough, and from that day to this, though the machine has been greatly
improved, Whitney's first idea still holds good. It was a saw-gin then,
and it is a saw-gin still. "Gin," we may say here, is short for
"engine."

This is the plan. There is a grid, or row of wires, set upright and so
close together that the seeds will not go through the openings. Behind
these is a set of circular saws, so placed that their teeth pass through
the openings between the wires. When the machine is set in motion the
cotton is put into a hopper, which feeds it to the grid, and the
revolving saws catch the fibre or lint with their teeth and drag it
through the wires. The seeds are too large to follow, so the cotton is