The difficulty of removing the seeds from the staple practically thrust cotton out of common use. In India a primitive and cumbersome set of rollers called a churka partially cleaned India cotton. A Yankee schoolmaster, Eli Whitney, set King Cotton on a throne by his invention of the cotton-gin in 1792. This comparatively simple but inestimable invention completely revolutionized cloth manufacture in England and America. It also changed general commerce, industrial development, and the social and economic order of things, for it gave new occupations and offered new modes of life to hundreds of thousands of persons. It entirely changed and cheapened our dress, and altered rural life both in the North and South. A man could, by hand-picking, clean only about a pound of cotton a day. The cotton-gin cleaned as much in a day as had taken the hand-picker a year to accomplish. Cotton was at once planted in vast amounts; but it certainly was not plentiful till then. Whitney had never seen cotton nor cotton seed when he began to plan his invention; nor did he, even in Savannah, find cotton to experiment with until after considerable search. After the universal manufacture and use of the cotton-gin, negro women wove cotton in Southern houses, sometimes spinning their own cotton thread; more frequently buying it mill-spun. But, after all, this was in too small amounts to be of importance; it needed the spinning-jennies and power-looms of vast mills to use up the profuse supply afforded by the gin. A very interesting account of the domestic manufacture of cotton in Tennessee about the year 1850 was written for me by Mrs. James Stuart Pilcher, State Regent of the Daughters of the American Revolution in Tennessee. A portion of her pleasant story reads:--