ne do its work.

They were greatly astonished.

For what did they see?

This curious little machine cleaned the cotton of its seed.

And it would clean in a day more than a man could do in months.

They went to their homes.

They told everybody about it.

Great crowds began coming to see it.

But they were refused permission to do so.

This was because it had not yet been patented.

So one night some wicked men broke into the building.

They stole the cotton-gin.

You can well imagine how dreadful this was.

Mr. Whitney had no money.

So Mr. Miller agreed to be his partner.

Mr. Miller had come to Georgia from the North.

He, too, was a graduate of Yale College.

He afterward married Mrs. Greene.

He became Mr. Whitney's partner in May, 1773.

Perhaps you wonder why the machine was called a gin. It was a short
way of saying engine.

A gin is a machine that aids the work of a person.

The cotton-gin was made to work much the same as the hand of a
person.

It dragged the cotton away from the seed.

And now begins the sorrowful part of the story.

Before Mr. Whitney could get his patent, several other gins had been
made.

Each claimed to be the best.

The plans were all stolen from Mr. Whitney's.

[Illustration: ROLLER-GIN.]

One was the roller-gin.

This crushed the seed in the cotton.

Of course this injured the cotton.

Another was the saw-gin.

This was exactly like Mr. Whitney's, except that the saws were set
differently.

Many lawsuits were begun.

Mr. Whitney went to Connecticut.

There he had a shop for making the gins.

When the suits began he had to return to Georgia.

In this way two years went by.

By this time everyone knew the value of the gin.

Mr. Whitney went to New York.

There he became ill.

His illness lasted three weeks.

Then he was able to go on to New Haven.

[Illustration: SAW-GIN, 1794.]

There he found that his shop had been destroyed by fire.

All his machines and papers were burned.

He was four thousand dollars in debt.

But neither Mr. Miller nor Mr. Whitney were the kind of men who give
up easily.

Mr. Miller wrote that he would give all his time, thought, labor,
and all the money he could borrow to help.

"It shall never be said that we gave up when a little perseverance
would have carried us through," he said.

About this time bad news came from England.

The cotton, you remember, was then all sent there for manuf