The principle of this and a later patent taken out by Paul covered the invention of what is technically known as roller-spinning, but which required further improvement before it could be profitably used. John Kay, a native of Walmersly, near Bury, where he was born July 16, 1704, was the undoubted inventor of the fly-shuttle which was patented in 1733, and of several other important machines connected with the trade. His melancholy history cannot here be repeated, but his life was one long struggle against ignorance and ingratitude. The people who were most to be benefited by his invention broke up his machines and drove him homeless to France. His appeal to Government was in vain, and even those who adopted the fly-shuttle refused to pay for its use. He died an exile from his country in obscurity and poverty. Let us take a glance at the daily work carried on by the cottagers and small farmers in Lancashire at the time when Kay made known his great invention. Samuel Bamford, of Middleton, who was well able to give testimony on this subject, writes: "The farming was generally of that kind which was soonest and most easily performed, and it was done by the husband and other males of the family, whilst the wife and daughters and maid-servants, if there were any of the latter, attended to the churning, cheese-making, and household work; and when that was finished, they busied themselves in carding, slubbing and spinning wool or cotton, as well as forming it into warps for the looms. The husband and sons would next, at times when farm labour did not call them abroad, size the warp, dry it, and beam it in the loom, and either they or the females, whichever happened to be least employed, would weave the warp down. A farmer would generally have three or four looms in his house, and then--what with the farming, easily and leisurely though it was performed, what with the house-work, and what with the carding, spinning and weaving--there was ample employment for the family. If the rent was raised from the farm, so much the better; if not, the deficiency was made up from the manufacturing profits." William Radcliffe, himself an improver of the power loom, gives another account of the life of the hand loom weaver. In 1770, he says, "the land [in Mellor, near Manchester] was occupied by between fifty and sixty farmers ... and out of these there were only six or seven who raised their rents directly from the produce of the farms; all the rest got their rents partly in some branch of trade, such as spinning and weaving woollen, linen or cotton. The cottagers were employed entirely in this manner, except for a few weeks in harvest. Being one of those cottagers, and intimately acquainted with all the rest, as well as every farmer, I am better able to relate particularly how the change from the old system of hand labour to the new one of machinery operated in raising the price of land. Cottage rents at that time,