"He was telling us about some of the people who
had done great things in the world and explaining how long and how hard
they had to work at them. The inventors, for instance, had to think and
think about the things they invented. It didn't just come to them all
in a minute as I used to believe it did."

Although his mother did not look up from her sewing she nodded
encouragingly.

"There was Eli Whitney," continued Carl, coming nearer. "I remembered
about him because of the mills here. He invented the cotton gin, you
know. Mr. Kimball told us that Whitney went through Yale and then
started down South to be a tutor in somebody's family without any idea
of ever being an inventor. But when he got to where he was going the
people who had hired him had changed their minds and found somebody
else and poor Eli Whitney was out of a job."

"A shabby trick!"

"Yes. Still, it was lucky for him, just the same," responded Carl,
"because on the way down he had met the widow of General Greene and she
was sorry for him and asked him to her house. He'd just been vaccinated
because there was lots of smallpox in the South and he was feeling
rotten. You know how sore your arm gets and how sick you are sometimes.
Remember Martin? Well, anyhow, Mrs. Greene either knew what it meant to
be vaccinated or else she was kind of ashamed of the way her part of
the country had treated Eli Whitney. Or maybe she was just kind-hearted
like you. Anyhow she invited Mr. Whitney to come to Savannah when she
saw how mean he felt and the fit he threw at finding himself so far
from home without money or a job."

"Carl!"

"Well, wouldn't you have thrown a fit? I think Mrs. Greene was a
peach," went on Carl, passing serenely over the reproof. "She was
mighty kind to take a stranger into her house when he had no friends."

"Certainly."

"By this time Mr. Whitney had decided to be a lawyer and while he was
making his home at Mrs. Greene's he began to read all the law books he
could lay hands on. Then one day Mrs. Greene busted her embroidery
frame----"

"Did _what_?"

"Oh, you know, Ma," fretted Carl, at being interrupted. "She smashed
the thing and----"

"What had that to do with it?"

"Everything; because, you see, Eli Whitney mended it so nicely that
Mrs. Greene was pleased into the ground and thought he was the smartest
person ever. His father had had a shop at home where as a boy he had
learned to use tools. But of course Mrs. Greene didn't k