They built seven wooden huts on the shore of the Pacific, calling this winter camp Fort Clatsop. They made friends with the Indians of the Columbia River region, and gathered data for the government and supplies for their return trip. As instructed by President Jefferson, they sent two of their number back around the world on a ship by way of China and the Cape of Good Hope, with copies of records and information they had thus far collected. In March, 1806, Lewis and Clark started back on their journey of more than four thousand miles, reaching St. Louis in six months, after many more thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes. They had been gone from St. Louis two years and four months, and during that time had traveled altogether a distance of almost eight thousand five hundred miles. Often the party suffered terrible hardships and were in almost constant danger from wild animals, the winter cold and the lack of supplies and comforts. For fourteen months they were shut off from all communication with the world and their friends were very anxious about their safety.

Lewis and Clark had accomplished great things by their expedition. They had made friends of the natives and learned many things about the wonderful regions they explored. Their work helped to keep Russia and England out of the valley of the Columbia River and to give that rich country to the United States. The task of opening up the west, begun so long before by brave French explorers, was now completed by those American patriot partners, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.

DAVY CROCKETT, THE HERO OF THE ALAMO

The lad did not sleep much that night, and at four o’clock next morning he was on his way to keep his word, though he had to wade seven miles through the deep snow in a blinding blizzard. He met the man with the wagon and was soon happy in being headed for home. The roads were rough and the heavy cart jolted over logs and stumps. The boy could not stand it, not because it was rough, but because they went so slowly. He soon got off to walk the two or three hundred miles that remained. But after he had hurried on foot a hundred miles or so, he saw, to his great joy, a drover whom he recognized, for the man had stopped at his father’s log tavern in Tennessee. The drover took him about a hundred miles on his way, but turned off before reaching the place where Davy lived. The boy had to walk on quite a distance farther, swimming rivers and wading swamps. He did not mind that, for his heart was light—he was going home! He had a happy time telling the family—Davy had seven brothers and sisters—all about his strange journey over the mountains and back.

The boy was soon hired to pay another of his father’s debts. When Davy expected to be paid in money, the man gave him a note instead. But Davy was glad to be able to help in this way. Another time he went and hired out on purpose to pay a bill his father owed. As his wages were small, it took a long time to pay a few dollars.

When Davy was thirteen he could not read nor write. At that time he was working for a good Quaker neighbor. The boy asked permission to work two days a week, just to pay his board, and spend the other days in school. Young Crockett learned “the three R’s—Readin’, ’Ritin’, ’Rithmetic”—well enough to do the simple business of pioneer life.

Davy’s highest ambition was to own a horse and a gun. When he had a rifle and a pony he thought he was old enough to marry a girl of seventeen. He seems not to have thought much about having a home of his own. The boy bridegroom took possession of a deserted log cabin. The bride’s father gave them a cow, and the good Quaker lent the young couple fifteen dollars to start housekeeping. Davy Crockett wrote, after they had bought many fine things with that fifteen dollars, “We were then fixed up pretty grand, so we thought.”

After three years the young Crocketts owned, besides the horse and gun, two cows, two calves, two colts and two children. But now that he had a home of his own, the young hunter was too restless to stay in it. When that region became so thickly settled that neighbors lived within a mile or two of one another, the nervous young pioneer moved hundreds of miles, to a newer country where he could find “elbow room.” His devoted wife took their little children and went with him to the rougher region among Indians, bears, and other wild animals.

Davy Crockett found friends wherever he went. He was happy-hearted and full of funny stories. He had a humorous way of saying things that pleased those rough-and-ready western people. His homely yarns had a meaning deeper than the surface, like those told twenty years later by a young man named Abe Lincoln. Crockett’s backwoods stories and western slang were quoted all over the country. He told of “treeing a coon” once, and of how, as he was about to shoot, the raccoon exclaimed, “Don’t shoot, I’ll come right down. I know I’m a gone coon!” “I’ll come right down” and “I’m a gone coon” became popular expressions everywhere.

Crockett became a great hunter. He killed all the bears in the country around him and had exciting times hunting big game wherever he lived. He was wise and sensible in helping and advising his neighbors. The people in that pioneer country elected David Crockett a justice of the peace. They did not care whether he knew much about common law so long as he was possessed of common sense.

When the Creeks and other Indians in the southern states went on the warpath and murdered hundreds of people, General Jackson, the great man of Tennessee, led thousands of white men to kill all the Indians known to have taken part in that massacre, just as he would have tried to rid the country of dangerous bears or snakes. When Davy Crockett got the word he told his patient little wife, “I’m going to help fight the Indians.”

“Oh, Davy,” she exclaimed, “what will become of us—hundreds of miles from all my friends? The Indians will come and kill us while you are away.”

But Davy Crockett could not stay. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “My country needs me, and if we don’t fight and kill the Indians they will come and kill us all, that’s sure.”

Even when fighting in General Jackson’s army, Davy Crockett was “a law unto himself.” The officers decided to let him do as he liked, for he seemed to wish to do the right thing by them all. He would be missing for hours, and then come back with some game, big or little, to feast the company. Food was very scarce on the long march. When they got to fighting the Indians, Crockett knew exactly what to do. His aim was as sure then as it was when hunting bear or deer. Many a time when a big brave had his tomahawk raised to kill a fallen white man, the savage suddenly dropped dead where he stood. The astonished soldier would rise, look around, and mutter, “Davy Crockett must be somewhere around.” Davy’s bear-hunting, sharpshooting, and Indian fighting were so remarkable that his life was a strong proof of the saying, “Truth is stranger than fiction.”

After General Jackson had put all the hostile savages out of the way and made it safe to live in those western states, the people were so grateful to Davy Crockett for his part in it that they put him up for election to Congress. Rival candidates, who felt much more fitted to go to Washington, made all manner of fun of Davy Crockett, and said the people ought to be ashamed to send a man like that to represent them in Congress. But the people said, “Davy Crockett ain’t much on book-l’arnin’ an’ spoutin’ poetry, but neither are we. He knows our life and just what we want. He ain’t much of a lawyer, but he’s got good sense, an’ he can represent us better’n a dozen lawyers.”

Those people knew what they were doing. Though Davy Crockett did not know much about books, he was not ignorant, for he was well-educated in the real life of that western frontier. So the people elected him three times to Congress, and he came to be loved and admired there for his homely wisdom and his quaint way of making others understand just what he meant. While he was a member of Congress he traveled up and down the eastern states. Wherever he went he was cheered and feasted. In Philadelphia, the home of American independence, the people presented him with a beautiful rifle and a hunting-knife and tomahawk of razor steel. He told the people he would love and cherish that rifle as he would a daughter. Then and there he named the gun “Betsy.”

While he was away in Congress and the east, Crockett’s enemies worked against him, and he was defeated in the fourth election. The boyish longing for home came over him then, and he wrote:

Yet, much as Davy Crockett loved his home, he loved his country more. With this spirit he had also such reckless love of adventure that he could not bear to live at ease when his country needed him.

The American settlers were having terrible times down in Texas. Thousands of Americans in that country were struggling with the Mexicans, to decide who should control and own the Texas territory. General Santa Anna, the President of Mexico, had sent thousands of soldiers into that region, captured a brave little army of Americans, and, when these had been disarmed, coolly shot them down as if they had been cattle in a slaughter-house.

All these things were more than Davy Crockett’s flesh and blood could bear. In his opinion “such cattle as those Mexicans” should be treated like bears or murderous Indians. Armed with “Betsy,” his new rifle, “to use if need be for his country’s glory,” he was ready to leave for Texas. He was now fifty-four years old, but his heart was young. When his friends tried to convince him that the trouble in Texas was no affair of his, Crockett replied that the news from those struggling heroes down there wrung his heart. “Sorrow will make even an oyster feel poetical,” and Davy left behind him a farewell poem, of which this is a small part:

When Davy Crockett arrived at San Antonio, Colonel Travis, the commander of the Americans, had turned an old Spanish mission called the Alamo into a fort. Santa Anna was near at hand with a large army to capture the one hundred and eighty men who were waiting in the Alamo.

It would have made the hearts of that brave garrison glad if they could have looked into the future far enough to see that General Sam Houston would soon come there and drive the Mexicans out of the country; and that with the war-cry, “Remember the Alamo!” American soldiers would free Texas from Mexico’s cruel rule, and finally add the vast territory of Texas, New Mexico, and California to the United States. But they only knew that Santa Anna was near with five thousand Mexican soldiers and that there was no hope of relief.

When Santa Anna and his army had arrived and surrounded the flimsy Spanish convent-fort, he called on Colonel Travis to surrender. The American answer was a cannon-shot. Then the Mexicans raised a red flag as a signal that “no quarter” would be given; that is, that no American could expect anything but death at their hands.

Then the battle began. The walls of the Alamo were not strong, for the convent was not built for a fort. Yet it took that great Mexican army eleven days to capture it. Among the Americans were thirteen backwoods hunters like David Crockett and Colonel James Bowie, the inventor of the famous Bowie knife then much used in frontier fighting. Bowie was ill, but he fought like a hero, as did each of the others, to sell his life as dearly as possible. On the last day Colonel Travis offered to let the few men who were left go out with a white flag and ask the Mexicans to spare their lives, but not a man would go.

At last the walls of their frail fortress were battered down and four thousand Mexicans came rushing in. They found Crockett with only five men left—their backs to the wall fighting to the bitter end. It is said that Crockett was the last to fall. When beset by too many Mexicans to reload and fire “Betsy,” he took his gun by the barrel and clubbed several Mexicans to death before they shot him down.

The Alamo fell on the 6th of March, 1836.

When they found the journal Davy Crockett had kept during the fight, they read his last words in it, written late the night before:

FAMOUS INVENTORS

HOW ELI WHITNEY MADE COTTON KING

While he was tutor, Whitney made playthings for the children, and fixed many handy things for Mrs. Greene to use about the house. She told him he ought to make a machine that would take the seeds out of the bolls, or fluffy heads, of the cotton plant. Great machines had been contrived for spinning and weaving cotton, but it took a man or a woman all day to pick the seeds out of a pound of cotton wool.

Eli Whitney went to work to make something that would do what in those days seemed impossible. He not only had to invent a cotton-gin, as the new machine was called, but he was obliged to make tools for making the machine itself, and even tools for making the other tools. But within a short time he had invented and built a machine which worked quite well. Still he was not satisfied. He locked himself up in a room and worked day and night until he had built a perfect cotton-gin which would work very fast and would clear out all the fine cotton seeds. This was in 1793, while Washington was President, and Philadelphia was the capital of the United States.

Whitney would not let any one but Mrs. Greene and a friend named Miller see the model, or pattern, of his cotton-gin until he could take out a patent for it. But before he could get money enough to have his gin patented, someone broke into his little shop and carried off his precious model.

Then the poor inventor had to begin again and make another machine, to prove to the officials in the Patent Office that the cotton-gin was his invention, before they could make out for him the patent right, which said he was the only person allowed to make and sell that machine in the United States. Before he could get this patent he found that others were making, selling, and trying to get a patent for machines made like the stolen pattern.

Young Whitney’s friend Miller furnished him money, not only to secure his patent rights and make the machines, but to go into the courts and fight those who were trying to steal his rights as they had stolen his model. These people made him so much trouble and expense that it took thirteen years to beat them by lawsuits. A patent protected an inventor, by keeping others from making and selling that machine, for only fourteen years. When his rivals were beaten, Whitney had but one year left in which he and his friends could sell the machine so as to pay for all his time, labor, and expense. In that year he just made his cotton-gin pay for itself. But he had the great satisfaction of making the land in the southern states known as the cotton belt (because cotton could be grown in those states) worth hundreds of millions of dollars more than before. The raising of cotton grew to be such a great industry that negro slavery became more and more necessary in the cotton-growing states. So, without knowing it, Eli Whitney, by increasing the production of cotton, increased the number of black slaves in the south, and helped to cause the struggle for and against slavery, many years later. But as the inventor did not know that his cotton-gin would make slavery a curse to the United States, he was not to blame.

After his patent had run out and he could make no more money by selling his cotton-gins, Whitney got a government contract for the making of guns. He invented new machinery to make the parts of his guns and was the first to have each part made by a different man according to an exact pattern. When the parts were put together to make a complete gun no special fitting was necessary because each piece was exactly like every other piece for that same part. If a part of the gun was broken it could be replaced with a new one without any difficulty. Before that when one man made an entire gun all the parts were specially fitted and if one got broken a new one had to be made and fitted by hand, which took a long time and made repairs very expensive. His factories and the homes of his workmen formed a suburb of New Haven called Whitneyville.

Eli Whitney furnished hundreds of thousands of men with the weapons they used in putting down the slavery which his cotton-gin had been made the innocent cause of increasing.

“FULTON’S FOLLY”

One of the pupils brought some artist’s brushes and paints to school, and Robert, who already showed real talent for drawing, was allowed to use them. He made such fine pictures that the other boy gave him the paints. This was the beginning of young Fulton’s career as a painter. But Robert was not content with painting pictures. He was always trying to make things, or to find ways of doing things more easily.

Robert was eleven when the American colonies went into the War for Independence. During this war, when candles were scarce, people were warned not to waste them in lighting up for the Fourth of July. It was to be a saving rather than a safe and sane holiday. The Fulton boy made up his mind to celebrate the day. So he got some gunpowder and pasteboard and made little tubes with a stick pointing out at one end of each. The neighbors were astonished on the night of the Fourth of July to see these tubes, one after another, go whizzing up in the sky, leaving a trail of sparks behind them. They said to one another, “That Fulton boy’s a genius!” Robert had made the first skyrockets these Americans had ever seen.

Robert Fulton afterward became acquainted with Dr. Benjamin Franklin and learned much from the kind old inventor. When Fulton was a young man he went to London and studied painting with Benjamin West, the greatest American painter up to that time. He went also to France to study art. Meantime he kept on inventing things. The French were at war with many of the countries of Europe at that time. Fulton had always been interested in boats; and we have seen that he knew how to use gunpowder. He planned a new kind of boat, which he thought would help the French in their war. It was a submarine, and was provided with torpedoes which could be shot under water. They would have pierced the wooden sides of the best ships built in those days. Fulton’s diving boat was shown to the French minister of war, but the government experts could not understand its great value in war and refused to make use of it in the war. Shortly after, a British officer remarked that Napoleon’s loss of Fulton’s diving boat was the most important event of the century.

Napoleon, who was then emperor of the French, wrote to one of his own advisers:

But, harmful as Fulton’s submarine might have proven to Napoleon’s enemies, the chance which Napoleon missed was not important compared with the results of Robert Fulton’s next invention.

Robert Fulton had, as a lad, gone fishing with some neighbors on a flatboat in the river. This craft they had to push along with poles, which was very slow, hard work. Bob began at once to try to fix something which would make the boat go faster and more easily. He arranged paddles at the stern which worked quite well. Then he improved this by making paddle wheels. After that he attached the wheels to an engine. He went on working with engines and wheels until at last, while he was in Paris, he succeeded in building a boat with a steam-engine to make it go. He tried it on the River Seine, which flows through Paris. The boat did go a little; but the engine was too heavy, and the watching crowds saw Fulton’s queer boat sink to the bottom.

After he returned to America, Fulton went on improving his steamboat until he had built one which he thought would run up the Hudson River from New York City to Albany. He named this odd-looking craft the Clermont, and invited a few of his friends to make the trial trip. A great crowd came down to the wharf in New York City to have a little fun watching “Fulton’s Folly,” as they called the steamboat. People laughed at the idea that a heavy iron engine could make a boat go anywhere but to the bottom.

Even Fulton’s friends, waiting on the deck of the queer-looking vessel, felt foolish and looked anxious. The boat, however, started off, and the people on the shore began to cheer. Out in the river it stopped like a balky horse, and the cheers were turned to jeers. Fulton looked hurriedly at the engine, found out what was the trouble, and soon fixed it. Then the boat went puffing away up the river against the current at the rate of six miles an hour, and the friends on deck thought they were going very fast, as there were no railroads then and this was faster than a sailboat could go. Fulton kept on improving his boats so that within a few years there were steamboats on other rivers of the country. Within a century “ocean greyhounds” were racing across the Atlantic, and “superdreadnoughts,” the largest battleships, were being built for the great navies of the world. Submarines were used by many nations in the World War, but their invention, important as it was, could not well be called the greatest event of the century. It was the sailing of “Fulton’s Folly” which might have been said to change the face of the world, because it was the first step on the way to the wonderful steamships of to-day.

Just as that ingenious little boy tried to help his friends by making their flatboat run faster so Robert Fulton, as a man, had made the people of the world richer, happier, and better for all the ages to come.

HOW MORSE SENT LETTERS BY LIGHTNING

Finley Morse was sent to Yale College, where he was much interested in science and philosophy. But he kept at his drawing and coloring, and became a successful painter. That was years before any one knew how to take photographs; so Mr. Morse painted a great many portraits and did such good work that he received high prices for them. Believing that the artists of America could help one another, he influenced some of them to organize the National Academy of the Arts of Design, and they elected him their first president. When Lafayette, who had been a young officer on General Washington’s staff nearly fifty years before, came to America again as an old man, the people of America wished to have the best portrait that could be painted of the Frenchman who had helped the Americans in the War

for Independence. Finley Morse was chosen to paint this picture of General Lafayette.

While Mr. Morse was in Washington at work on this picture, he received word from his home in New Haven that his young wife had died suddenly of heart disease. Before he could receive the letter she was buried. People in those days traveled by stage-coach, and it took at least a week for a letter to go from Boston to Washington. When the sorrowing father went home to arrange for the care of his three motherless children, he spoke of the slowness of sending word from place to place, and said he hoped the time would come when news could be sent long distances in an instant. But of course he had no idea then that he would have anything to do with bringing that blessing to mankind.

When Morse was returning from one of his visits to Europe to study art, several of his friends on the ship were talking at the table about what someone had done by way of sending signals like lightning by means of electricity. “If they can do that,” said Mr. Morse, “why could we not write letters in a second or two from New York to Charleston with it?” The others laughed at the idea.

“Why not?” kept ringing in Mr. Morse’s ears. He stayed in his stateroom to study and think. He remembered what he had learned from his professors in college about electricity. With such materials as he could get together on shipboard, he made magnets and electrical appliances. By the time the ship sailed up New York harbor, Mr. Morse had not only a good idea of the way to go to work to make a telegraph apparatus, but he had made up the “dot-and-dash code,” now in use in telegraphy.

The idea took such a hold on his mind that he could no longer paint pictures. But when he talked to others about it, it all seemed impossible—“too good to be true”—and he could not find wealthy men who would lend money enough to enable him to prove that a message could be sent a long distance in a moment of time by telegraph.

While Mr. Morse was waiting and struggling to start “the electro-magnetic telegraph” he made a bare living by taking the first photographic likenesses, called daguerreotypes, in America.

After eleven years of hard work and poverty so keen that he had to go hungry sometimes, Mr. Morse’s friends in Congress passed a bill in the House to furnish him government money enough for a trial line forty miles long. But on the last day of the session, which was to end at midnight, there were over a hundred bills ahead of his in the Senate. Mr. Morse went home that night utterly discouraged.

In the morning Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of the Commissioner of Patents, came to congratulate him. His bill had been passed just before midnight and the President had signed it, giving Mr. Morse all the money he needed to show how he could “send letters by lightning.”

The overjoyed inventor told Miss Ellsworth that when his line was all ready she should send the first message over it.

It was decided that the trial line should be put up between Washington and Baltimore. It was completed before the 24th of May, 1844. One end of it was in the Capitol at Washington and the other at Baltimore. Miss Ellsworth’s first message, flashed by S. F. B. Morse to his partner, Mr. Vail, in Baltimore, was this text of Scripture:

The first news sent out to the whole country was that of James K. Polk’s nomination at the Convention in Baltimore as the Democratic candidate for President of the United States.

Mr. Morse’s struggles were now over. The telegraph became a wonderful success and he was honored by presidents, kings, and princes with medals, stars, crosses, and other decorations. The inventor now turned his attention to running telegraph lines under water, and laid a cable under New York harbor. About twenty years later another man, Cyrus W. Field, succeeded in connecting America with Europe by laying a cable beneath the Atlantic Ocean.

So S. F. B. Morse’s words were realized: “If I can make the telegraph work ten miles, I can make it go around the globe.” He really made true these words of Puck, one of Shakespeare’s fairies:

Men soon began trying to talk without connecting wires. Marconi invented the radio-telegraph in 1896 and the radio-phone followed. Now it is possible to send wireless messages almost around the world.

CYRUS H. M’CORMICK AND THE STORY OF THE REAPER

Although the neighbors had laughed at his father for being so foolish as to wish to invent a labor-saving machine for harvesting, and in spite of his father’s warnings that such a thing could never be made, the idea of a reaper haunted the young man’s mind. He began to work at it as a boy and kept it up until he was a grown man. He had improved the cradle and his two ploughs without much difficulty, but the reaping machine was a hard problem. It was more difficult because the grain is often lodged, or matted down, and it is necessary not only to cut it but to lay it in even rows, so that it can be bound in sheaves ready for threshing.

But in 1831, the same year in which he made his double-furrow plough, McCormick built a machine that would reap quite well. He had made every part of it by hand. This machine had vibrating blades which cut against each other in about the same manner as shears. It also had a reel to draw the standing grain within reach of the moving blades, and a platform to catch the grain as fast as it was cut. He first tried the machine by reaping several acres of oats. The next year he harvested seventy-five acres of wheat, to the great astonishment of the neighboring farmers, and his father’s pride.

Cyrus McCormick was not satisfied to let well enough alone. He spent nine more years in making his reaper do everything just right before he was willing to sell it. The farmers admired the clever machine, but they were not ready to buy it, because they thought it would take work from many laborers. The money panic of 1837 occurred during this time, and young McCormick went into the iron-smelting business to make a living during the hard times.

In 1840 he had put his reaper into more perfect shape and now began to manufacture it, first in Cincinnati, then in Chicago. The farmers in the western prairies could not hire laborers enough to harvest their great fields of grain by hand. So the McCormick reaper began to be used in that part of the country. Cyrus H. McCormick, unlike most inventors, was a successful business man. He had to enlarge his factories. To his harvester he kept adding devices until it gathered the grain into sheaves, bound the sheaves with twine, and tossed them out sideways on the ground. He made them so that they would mow grass also.

After his reapers and mowers became well known in America, the successful inventor and manufacturer went abroad to introduce them in Europe. He showed the machine at the first World’s Fair in London, in 1851. People in England laughed, and the London Times reported that the reaper was a “cross between a chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine.”

But when the object of their laughter was taken out harvesting in England, the joke was on the men who had made fun of a machine they could not understand. The newspapers then began to praise the inventor they had ridiculed, and Cyrus H. McCormick awoke one morning and found himself famous. He not only received the Great Medal from the World’s Fair, but was elected an officer of the Legion of Honor in Paris, and received the high honor of being made a member of the French Academy of Science.

So the McCormick boy, who did not mind being laughed at and was never content with doing less than his very best, became not only one of the wealthiest men in America, but added many hundreds of millions of dollars to the wealth of his country, and gave an immense benefit to the world.

ELIAS HOWE AND HIS SEWING MACHINE

ELIAS HOWE was the son of a poor miller. He had to go to work when he was six years old. He was a lame, sickly boy and could never do heavy work. When he was old enough he went away to work in the mills. But as he grew up, his health was still so poor that he had to go back and live with his father.

Elias married when he was twenty-one and, within a few years, he had a wife and three children to support. Once when he was ill, his wife took in sewing to support their little family. As the young father lay on the bed watching his wife slowly plying her needle, he thought what a blessing it would be if a machine could be invented to sew much faster and better than by hand. The idea seemed to fill his mind, for he was an ingenious man. He said to himself, “I can’t do heavy work, but perhaps I can invent that machine.” At first he said nothing about it to his wife, but he watched her taking stitch after stitch for hours at a stretch.

When he was out of bed he made a model of the machine which he had been planning. In this rude affair he first had the needle with an eye in the middle. This needle was pointed at both ends, and worked sideways through the cloth, which was held upright. The stitches on this first machine were made like a chain, and the thread raveled out too easily.

Howe kept patiently at work until he hit upon the idea of laying the cloth to be sewed on a small table, and making the needle go up and down through it. He thought of a way to have the cloth pulled along as it was sewn. But the trouble was to get a stitch that would not rip or pull out. At last he tried a shuttle, which looped another thread with that in the needle so that the two made a lock-stitch. When he had done this, he had invented the sewing machine.

Like most inventors, Elias Howe was poor. He found a coal dealer named Fisher, who agreed to keep Howe and his family, and furnish five hundred dollars to pay for the first machines and have them patented. For this Fisher was to receive a half interest in the patents, and the sewing machine business afterward.

At first no one would buy the machine. Tailors thought it would throw too many men out of work. Mr. Fisher grew tired of his bargain and the Howes had to leave his house. There seemed to be a better chance to sell sewing machines in England; so the family went across the sea to London. But the inventor was again disappointed. He was glad to come back to his father’s house in America with his sick wife and his small children.