A few years before the Liverpool custom-house officers seized the eight bags, a boy named Eli Whitney was attending school in Westboro', Massachusetts, who was destined to help the planters out of the difficulty. He made water-wheels, which plashed in the roadside brooks, and windmills, which whirled upon his father's barn. He made violins, which were the wonder and admiration of all musicians. He set up a shop, and made nails by machinery, and thus earned money through the Revolutionary War. When not more than twelve years old, he stayed at home from meeting one Sunday alone, and took his father's watch to pieces, and put it together again so nicely that it went as well as ever. It was not the proper business for Sunday, however. When a young man, he went South to teach school. He happened to hear General Greene, the brave and noble man who had been a match for Lord Cornwallis, wish that there was a machine for cleaning cotton. He thought the matter over, went to work, and in a short time had a machine which, with some improvements, now does the work of a thousand negroes. He built it in secret, but the planters, getting wind of it, broke open his room, stole his invention, built machines of their own, and cheated him out of his property. About this time there was a poor cotton-spinner in England who thought he could invent a machine for spinning. He sat up late nights, and thought how to have the wheels, cranks, and belts arranged. At times he was almost discouraged, but his patient, cheerful, loving wife encouraged him, and he succeeded at last in making a machine which would do the work of a thousand spinners. He named it Jenny, for his wife, who had been so patient and cheerful, though she and the children, some of the time while he was studying upon the invention, had little to eat. The gin and the jenny made cotton cloth much cheaper than it had been. Many manufactories were built in England and in the New England States. More acres of cotton were planted in the South, and more negroes stolen from Africa. In the North, along the mill-streams, there was the click and clatter of machinery. A great many ships were needed to transport the cotton from the agricultural South to the manufactories of the commercial, industrious, trading North. The cotton crop of the South in 1784 was worth only a few hundred dollars, but the crop of 1860 was worth hundreds of millions, so great had been the increase.