HOW OUR NATION GREW.

do things better than their fathers had done them, and to invent and
make things that should help them do their work in the quickest and
best way.
 When your grandfather's grandfather was a boy, there was a man
named Eli Whitney, who made violins when he was a boy in his Mas-
sachusetts home, and worked his way through Yale College by mak-
ing violins and canes and mending broken-down clocks and machinery.
He went South to teach school, and when he saw how much time and
money were wasted in picking the seeds out of the cotton the South
was trying to raise he thought he could make something to do this
work. And he did. He invented a machine that would pick the cot-
ton clean and make it all ready to be turned into cloth, and save the
labor of forty men. This was called Whitney's cotton gin," and it
was so valuable that it made America the greatest cotton-raising
country in the world.
 About the same time there was a portrait painter who had been
 brought up as a boy on a farm in
 Pennslvania, who believed he could
 make a boat go by steam. His name
 ". was Robert Fulton. He kept on try-
 i -!L: j!-- ing; did not give up when he failed;
 at last succeeded; and when your grand-
 father's grandfather was a boy of about
 -fifteen he heard with much wonder how
 Robert Fulton had made a steamboat
 _K ___`E and sailed it from New York to Albany.
 "People laughed at the idea even then,
 and declared no one would dare to travel
in such risky things. But to-day we know how wrong they were, and
how right Robert Fulton was; for now, thanks to Fulton, we can steam
across the three thousand miles of sea between here and England in
less than six days. It used to take as many weeks to make the
voyage across the Atlantic when your grandfather's grandfather
was a boy.
 There were many other things that were thought out, or invented,