ng, with the aid of such valiant partisans as Marion, Sumter,
and Lee, to shut the British up in Charleston and win back the State.

Cornwallis, on the other hand, concluded to try his fortune in
Virginia, where there seemed to be a fine chance for fighting and
conquest. But he was not long there before he found himself shut up in
Yorktown like a rat in a trap, with Washington and his forces in front
and the French fleet in the rear. His surrender, soon after, not only
freed the South from its foes, but cured George III. of any further
desire to put down the rebels in America.

_ELI WHITNEY, THE INVENTOR OF THE COTTON-GIN._

In the harvest season of the cotton States of the South a vast, fleecy
snow-fall seems to have come down in the silence of the night and
covered acres innumerable with its virgin emblem of plenty and
prosperity. It is the regal fibre which is to set millions of looms in
busy whirl and to clothe, when duly spun and woven, half the population
of the earth. That "cotton is king" has long been held as a potent
political axiom in the United States, yet there was a time when cotton
was not king, but was an insignificant member of the agricultural
community. How cotton came to the throne is the subject of our present
sketch.

In those far-off days when King George of England was trying to force
the rebellious Americans to buy and drink his tea and pay for his
stamps, the people of Georgia and South Carolina were first beginning to
try if they could do something in the way of raising cotton. After the
war of independence was over, an American merchant in Liverpool received
from the South a small consignment of eight bags of cotton, holding
about twelve hundred pounds, the feeble pioneer of the great cotton
commerce. When it was landed on the wharves in Liverpool, in 1784, the
custom-house officials of that place looked at it with alarm and
suspicion. What was this white-faced stranger doing here, claiming to
come from a land that had never seen a cotton-plant? It must have come
from somewhere else, and this was only a deep-laid plot to get itself
landed on English soil without paying an entrance fee.

So the stranger was seized and locked up, and Mr. Rathbone, the
merchant, had no easy time in proving to the officials that it was
really a scion of the American soil, and that the ships that brought it
had the right to do so. But after it was released from confinement there
was still a difficulty