A few years afterwards a young man named Eli Whitney went South to teach in a private family, but before he got there some one else had his situation, and he was left with nothing to do. Mrs. Greene, the widow of General Greene, who fought so well in the Revolution, took pity on him and gave him a home in her house. He paid her by fixing up things about her house. She found him so handy that she asked him if he could not invent a machine to take the seeds out of the cotton. Whitney said he would try, and he set himself to work. It was not long before he had a machine made which did the work wonderfully well. This machine is known as the "cotton-gin," or cotton engine, for gin is short for engine. On one side of it are wires so close together that the seeds cannot get through. Between them are circular saws which catch the cotton and draw it through, while the seeds pass on. The machine was a simple one, but it acted like magic. A hundred negroes could not clean as much cotton in a day as one machine. The price of cotton soon went down and a demand for it sprang up. In 1795, when the cotton gin was made, only about 500,000 pounds of cotton were produced in this country. By 1801 this had grown to 20,000,000 pounds. Now it has grown to more than 12,000,000 bales, of nearly 500 pounds each. This is sold to foreign countries and is worked in our own mills at home, being made into millions of yards of cloth of many kinds to clothe the people of the earth. All this comes from the work of Eli Whitney's machine. And the seed taken from the cotton is pressed for the oil it contains, so that from a year's crop we get nearly 150,000,000 gallons of useful oil. CHAPTER XVIII THE ENGLISH AND AMERICANS FIGHT AGAIN FOR years before and after the year 1800 all Europe was filled with war and bloodshed. Most of my readers must have heard of Napoleon Bonaparte, one of the greatest generals that ever lived, and one of the most cruel men. He was at the head of the armies of France, and was fighting all Europe. England was his greatest enemy and fought him on land and sea, and this fighting on the sea made trouble between England and the United States. The English wanted men for their war-vessels and said they had a right to take Englishmen wherever they could find them. So they began to take sailors off of American merchant vessels. They said that these men were deserters from the British navy, but the fact is that many of them were true-born Americans; and our people grew very angry as this went on year after year.