The use of the fly-shuttle greatly expedited the process of weaving, and the spinning of cotton soon fell behind. The weavers were often brought to a stand-still for want of weft to go on with, and had to spend their mornings going about in search of it, sometimes without getting as much as kept them busy for the rest of the day. The scarcity of yarn was a constant complaint; and many a busy brain was at work trying to devise some improvement on the common hand-wheel. Amongst others, James Hargreaves, an ingenious weaver at Standhill, near Blackburn, who had already improved the mode of cleaning and unravelling the cotton before spinning, took the subject into consideration. One day, when brooding over it in his cottage, idle for want of weft, the accidental overturning of his wife's wheel suggested to him the principle of the spinning-jenny. Lying on its side, the wheel still continued in motion--the spindle being thrown from a horizontal into an upright position; and it occurred to him that all he had got to do was to place a number of spindles side by side. This was in 1764, and three years afterwards Hargreaves had worked out the idea, and constructed a spinning frame, with eight spindles and a horizontal wheel, which he christened after his wife Jenny, whose wheel had first put him in the right track. Directly the spinners of the locality got knowledge of this machine that was to do eight times as much as any one of them, they broke into the inventor's cottage, destroyed the jenny, and compelled him to fly for the safety of his life to Nottingham. He took out a patent, but the manufacturers leagued themselves against them. Sole, friendless, penniless, he could make no head against their numbers and influence, relinquished his invention, and died in obscurity and distress ten years after he had the misfortune to contrive the spinning-jenny. The history of the cotton manufacture now becomes identified with the lives of Arkwright, Crompton, and Cartwright--the inventors of the water-frame, the mule, and the power-loom. II.--SIR RICHARD ARKWRIGHT.