had formerly been noted
entirely deserted him, and he became sad and melancholy. His health did
not improve, and it was with difficulty that he could perform his daily
task. His strength was so slight that he would frequently return home
from his day's work too much exhausted to eat. He could only go to bed,
and in his agony he wished "to lie in bed forever and ever." Still he
worked faithfully and conscientiously, for his wife and children were
very dear to him; but he did so with a hopelessness which only those who
have tasted the depths of poverty can understand.

[Illustration: HOWE'S FIRST IDEA OF THE SEWING-MACHINE.]

About this time he heard it said that the great necessity of the age was
a machine for doing sewing. The immense amount of fatigue incurred and
the delay in hand-sewing were obvious, and it was conceded by all who
thought of the matter at all that the man who could invent a machine
which would remove these difficulties would make a fortune. Howe's
poverty inclined him to listen to these remarks with great interest. No
man needed money more than he, and he was confident that his mechanical
skill was of an order which made him as competent as any one else to
achieve the task proposed. He set to work to accomplish it, and, as he
knew well the dangers which surround an inventor, kept his own counsel.
At his daily labor, in all his waking hours, and even in his dreams, he
brooded over this invention. He spent many a wakeful night in these
meditations, and his health was far from being benefited by this severe
mental application. Success is not easily won in any great undertaking,
and Elias Howe found that he had entered upon a task which required the
greatest patience, perseverance, energy, and hopefulness. He watched his
wife as she sewed, and his first effort was to devise a machine which
should do what she was doing. He made a needle pointed at both ends,
with the eye in the middle, that should work up and down through the
cloth, and carry the thread through at each thrust; but his elaboration
of this conception would not work satisfactorily. It was not until 1844,
fully a year after he began the attempt to invent the machine, that he
came to the conclusion that the movement of a machine need not of
necessity be an imitation of the performance of the hand. It was plain
to him that there must be another stitch, and that if he could discover
it his difficulties would all be ended. A little later he conc