Young Richard, rising one morning, grasped the fact that he was now not alone in his prices. Others were running him dangerously close. He was merely one of many now, but with the enterprise that outdid others by-and-by in the great world of mechanical invention he resolved to strike out a bold new line. The old placard was taken down and another printed and set up in its stead. "_A clean shave for a halfpenny!_" But Arkwright was not content to stand still in shaving people's chins or in anything else. These were the days of wearing wigs, and it struck him that something was to be made out of wigs, or perukes, as they were called, and so he gave up his business of shaving in a measure and began to travel about the country buying and selling human hair. He regularly attended country fairs and bought the locks and tresses of the young girls who came there to be hired out to service. In time he grew to make successful bargains with these, and to add to this he discovered a chemical dye, with which he dyed the hair and sold it to wig-makers, and by-and-by "Arkwright's Hair" came to be known as the best in the market. It most likely was--at any rate, it may have been in those journeys--going in and out among the houses and cottages in the country that he came to be familiar with the sound of the "weaver's shuttle" and the turning of the "one-thread machine." Long years after he was to find that familiarity stand him in good stead. But, successful and hard-working as he was, life was still a struggle, and with all his efforts he earned but a bare living. It was hard to wrest a fortune from wig-making and chin-shaving, so gradually there grew up in his busy brain a project. It formed very slowly, but it did grow. It was the genius within him struggling with disadvantages and drawbacks that would have "posed" most men. His mind, leaning strongly to the mechanical, groped vaguely at first after something, and then gradually it settled down to the "spinning machine," and from that time onwards all his energies were bent on that. In his journeys among the cottagers it had been easy enough to see that the yarn could not be made quickly enough for the weaver, that though in thousands of cottages the "one-thread machine" turned from morning till night and again from night till morning, it could not keep pace with the shuttle. What was wanted was a dozen, fifty, a hundred threads to be made by a single pair of hands. Did he perhaps see dimly even then that he was to be the man who should throw out the old-fashioned hand-wheel? One day he noticed a red-hot bar of iron become elongated as it passed between two iron rollers. In that instant he first saw dimly the tiny seedling that was to grow one day to the mighty tree of the spinning-frame. The idea lodged in his brain and took firm hold of him.