Before that time it used to take one negro all day to clean a single pound of cotton of its seeds by picking them off one by one; now, Eli Whitney’s cotton-gin,[5] as he called his machine, would clean a thousand pounds in a day.

[Footnote 5:  Gin:  a shortened form of the word engine, meaning any kind of a machine.]

181.  Price of common cotton cloth to-day; what makes it so cheap; “King Cotton.”—­To-day nothing is much cheaper than common cotton cloth.  You can buy it for ten or twelve cents a yard, but before Whitney invented his cotton-gin it sold for a dollar and a half a yard.  A hundred years ago the planters at the south raised very little cotton, for few people could afford to wear it; but after this wonderful machine was made, the planters kept making their fields bigger and bigger.  At last they raised so much more of this plant than of anything else, that they said, “Cotton is king.”  It was Eli Whitney who built the throne for that king; and although he did not make a fortune by his machine, yet he received a good deal of money for the use of it in some of the southern states.

[Illustration:  CARRYING COTTON TO THE COTTON-GIN.]

Later, Mr. Whitney built a gun-factory near New Haven, Connecticut, at a place now called Whitneyville; at that factory he made thousands of the muskets which we used in our second war with England in 1812.

[Illustration:  THE “STAR SPANGLED BANNER."[6]]

[Footnote 6:  In the war of 1812 the British war-ships attacked Fort McHenry, one of the defences of Baltimore.  Francis Scott Key, a native of Maryland, who was then detained on board a British man-of-war, anxiously watched the battle during the night; before dawn the firing ceased.  Key had no means of telling whether the British had taken the fort until the sun rose; then, to his joy, he saw the American flag still floating triumphantly above the fort—­that meant that the British had failed in their attack, and Key, in his delight, hastily wrote the song of the Star Spangled Banner on the back of a letter which he had in his pocket.  The song was at once printed, and in a few weeks it was known and sung from one end of the United States to the other.]

182.  Summary.—­About a hundred years ago (1793), Eli Whitney of Westboro’, Massachusetts, invented the cotton-gin, a machine for pulling off the green seeds from cotton wool, so that it may be easily woven into cloth.  That machine made thousands of cotton-planters and cotton manufacturers rich, and by it cotton cloth became so cheap that everybody could afford to use it.

What name did a boy cut on a door?  What did Eli make in that workshop?  What did he make while his father was away?  What did his father say?  What did Eli’s fiddle seem to say?  What did Eli make next?  How did he make his nails?  Where did he go after he gave up making nails?  When he left college where did he go?  What lady did he become acquainted with?  What did he make