Among those who were inconvenienced for want of a better sort of yarn was young Samuel Crompton, who lived with his widowed mother and two sisters in an old country house called Hall-in-the-Wood, near what was then the little rural town of Bolton in the Moors. When Samuel was only five years old his father died, and left his widow with the three children on her hands, to struggle through the world as best she could. A hard-working, energetic, God-fearing woman, she buckled to the fight with a stout heart and a resolute will. Her husband had been both farmer and weaver, like most of the men in that quarter; and she did her best to fill his place, looking after the little farm and the three cows, and working at the loom, the yarn for which she taught the bairns to spin. Whatever she took in hand she did with might and main, and the result was, her webs were the best woven, her butter the richest, her honey the purest, her home-made wines the finest flavoured of any in the district. Small as her means were, she gave her boy the best education that could be got in Bolton--first at a day-school, and afterwards, when he was old enough to take his place by day between the treadles, at a night-school. Rigid in her sense of duty, and resolute to do her own share of the work, she exacted the same from others, and kept her lad tightly to the loom. Every day he had to do a certain quantity of work; and there was no looking her in the face unless each evening saw it done, and well done too. Anxious to satisfy his mother, and yet get time for his favourite amusement of fiddle-making and fiddle-playing, Sam grew quickly sensitive of the imperfections of the machinery he had to work with. "He was plagued to deeath," he used to say, "wi' mendin' the broken threeads;" and could not help thinking many a time whether the jenny could not be improved so as to spin more quickly, and produce a better thread. By the time he came to man's estate, in 1774, his thoughts had settled so far into a track, that he was able to begin making a contrivance of his own, which he hoped would accomplish the object he had in view. He had a few common tools which had belonged to his father, but his own clasp-knife served nearly every purpose in his ready hands. He had his "bits of things" filed at the smithy, and to get money for materials, he fiddled at the theatre for 1s. 6d. a night. Every minute he could spare from the task-work of the day was spent in his little room over the porch of the hall in forwarding his invention. As it advanced, he grew more and more engrossed with it, and often the dawn found him still at work on it. The good folks down in Bolton were sorely puzzled to think what light it was that was so often seen glimmering at uncanny hours up at the old hall. The story went abroad that the place was haunted, and that the ghost of some former resident, uneasy from the sorrows or the sins of his past life, kept watch and ward till cock crow, with a spectral lamp.