avannah.

Mrs. Greene invited young Whitney to her house; as he had been
disappointed in getting the place to teach, he was very glad to accept
her kind invitation. While he was there he made her an embroidery
frame. It was much better than the old one that she had been using,
and she thought the maker of it was wonderfully skilful.

[Footnote 4: General Greene: see paragraph 140.]

179. A talk about raising cotton, and about cotton seeds.--Not long
after this, a number of cotton-planters were at Mrs. Greene's house.
In speaking about raising cotton they said that the man who could
invent a machine for stripping off the cotton seeds from the plant
would make his fortune.

For what is called raw cotton or cotton wool, as it grows in the field,
has a great number of little green seeds clinging to it. Before the
cotton wool can be spun into thread and woven into cloth, those seeds
must be pulled off.

[Illustration: POD OF THE COTTON PLANT WHEN RIPE AND OPEN. On the
right a seed with the wool attached; on the left the seed after the
wool has been picked off.]

At that time the planters set the negroes to do this. When they had
finished their day's labor of gathering the cotton in the cotton
field, the men, women, and children would sit down and pick off the
seeds, which stick so tight that getting them off is no easy task.

[Illustration: NEGROES GATHERING COTTON IN THE FIELD.]

After the planters had talked awhile about this work, Mrs. Greene
said, "If you want a machine to do it, you should apply to my young
friend, Mr. Whitney; he can make anything." "But," said Mr. Whitney,
"I have never seen a cotton plant or a cotton seed in my life"; for
it was not the time of year then to see it growing in the fields.

180. Whitney gets some cotton wool; he invents the cotton-gin; what
that machine did.--After the planters had gone, Eli Whitney went to
Savannah and hunted about until he found, in some store or warehouse,
a little cotton wool with the seeds left on it. He took this back
with him and set to work to make a machine which would strip off the
seeds.

He said to himself, If I fasten some upright pieces of wire in a board,
and have the wires set very close together, like the teeth of a comb,
and then pull the cotton wool through the wires with my fingers, the
seeds, being too large to come through, will be torn off and left
behind. He tried it, and found that the cotton wool came through
without any seeds