the Captain was modest. Everybody agreed to that. Nevertheless he
certainly had at his tongue's end an astonishing amount of information
which came hither when occasion arose for him to use it.

Carl had an illustration of that one day when he chanced to drop a
remark about the Tartary lamb.

"Tartary lamb, eh!" commented his uncle, catching up the phrase
quickly. "And how, pray, did you hear of the Tartary lamb?"

"Mother told us."

"A funny idea, wasn't it?" Uncle Frederick spoke as if Tartary lambs
were topics of everyday conversation. "And yet no stranger than some of
the notions we hold now, I imagine. We do not know all there is to be
known ourselves--not by a good sight--even though we do think ourselves
very up-to-date. With all the learning the ages have rolled up handed
to us in a bundle we should blush were we not better informed than poor
Sir John Mandeville, who had no books to speak of. Had he been able to
read Herodotus, for example, he would then have learned from that Greek
writer who lived so many centuries ago that there was in India a wild
tree having for its fruit fleeces finer than those of sheep; and that
the natives spun cloth out of them and made clothing for themselves.
Herodotus tells many other interesting facts about cotton and its uses,
too. A present, he remarks, sent to the king of Egypt, was packed in
cotton so that it would not get broken. That sounds natural, doesn't
it? He even makes our clever inventor, Eli Whitney, appear unoriginal
by describing a Greek machine that separated cotton seeds from the
fiber."

"Then the cotton gin wasn't new, after all," frowned Carl.

"The idea of it was not new, no; but the device Whitney and his friend
Mr. Miller produced was a fresh method for getting this age-old result.
Up to 1760 the same primitive ginning machine was used in England as
had been used in India for many, many years. Think of that! But as
civilization grew and people not only wove more cloth but made an
increasing variety of kinds the demand for material to make it
increased. And old Herodotus is by no means the only early historian to
mention cotton. Other writers went into even more details than he,
describing the plant, its leaves and blossoms, and telling how it was
set out in rows. Apparently as long ago as 519 B.C. the Persians were
spinning and weaving cloth and dyeing it all sorts of colors, using for
the purpose the leaves and roots of tropical plants. It therefore