The lesson is almost too obvious to justify the formulating of a prophecy that the sewing machine business of the future is likely to concentrate in a comparatively few corporations, whose skill, capital and facilities will be sufficient to bring out the best machines, made of the best materials; paying their skilled operatives liberal wages, and yet enabled, by this subdivision of labor, to offer them to the people at a price within the reach of all. Such is the story of the Sewing Machine from its paltry and inauspicious beginning. Such were the struggles and trials of the man to whose genius the world owes the vast, incalculable, and forever accumulating benefits of this great invention. And when we try to conceive what the world would be to-day if the Sewing Machine and all its concomitant blessings were suddenly removed from among its inhabitants, we look at this record of his achievements and rich triumphs, and rejoice that the common experience of inventors was not realized in the Sewing Machine invention, but that in this instance, at least, a great mechanician lived to see his ──┤Genius Rewarded├── [Illustration: SINGER’S ORIGINAL MACHINE. ] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES Page Changed from Changed to 18 “_cat_ the first ship that “_eat_ the first ship that should cross the Atlantic by should cross the Atlantic by steam!” steam!” ● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.