r frame and something like
Hargreaves's jenny and yet wasn't like either of those things.
Therefore, as a joke, it was called a 'mule.'"

"Oh, I'm awfully glad he made it!" ejaculated the sympathetic Mary.
"Five years was such a long time to work. Wasn't it splendid of him!"

"Other people, I'm sorry to say, were not of your opinion," Carl
replied. "As I said before, the spinners and weavers were a crazy,
jealous lot. You remember how they treated Kay and Hargreaves? Well,
they hadn't improved any and were still just as mad at spinning
inventions and spinning inventors as they were before. Everything that
did away with hand labor was, they argued, an enemy and was going to
put them out of business."

"But how could they expect they were going to stop the progress of the
world?" asked Mrs. McGregor.

"They didn't think it was progress; they were just that stupid,"
returned Carl. "And I guess even if they had thought so it would have
been the same. They were determined to use nothing that reduced the
number of hand workers. So they set themselves to take out their
vengeance on all spinning machinery, and in order to put an end to it
mobs of workers went about smashing to atoms every spinning jenny they
could find that had more than twenty spindles."

"How nasty!" breathed Mary.

"How stupid!" rejoined her mother.

"Now, of course, Samuel Crompton wasn't going to have his new 'muslin
wheel' smashed to bits so he did not tell anybody what he had invented.
He simply took the thing to pieces and hid the parts round his
workroom. Some of them he put in the ceiling, some he tucked away under
the floor."

"Bully for him!" Mary cried. "It was a regular kid trick."

"I know it," agreed Carl. "He wasn't really a kid, though, because he
was twenty-seven years old at the time and was married and his wife had
just come to live at the big Crompton homestead. Well, after a little
while, things settled down and then Samuel Crompton dragged out the
parts of his hidden muslin wheel, put them together, and he and the
lady he had married went to work making the finest and strongest yarn
they could. Such fine thread had never before been made in all England
and you better believe when it began to appear it created a stir.
Everybody in Bolton went round trying to find out where it came from
and after the tidings spread about that the Cromptons were the people
who were producing the mysterious yarn, the town swelled with pride.
How