and Irish stews, Uncle Alexander took off
his Sunday's best and put on his week-day coat
again; and then his church Sabbath was at an
end. There was something very special and
characteristic in the whole proceeding: a bit of
broadcloth fetishism rich in all the elements of
British respectability,

Young Samuel had one pleasure, besides that
of reading, which was always a favourite
exercise of his: he had his violin; and many a
dreary hour he charmed away by scraping
unmelodious sounds from that tortured catgut,
many an angry scold of his fierce old mother he
forgot in the dismal wailings of what passed with
him for music. But even this harmless dissipation
grim Mistress Betty clutched aud girded at, only
suffering it at all— and then grudgingly— when
he had given in his appointed stint of work,
and made his daily tale of bricks without a flaw.
But his bricks were hard to make, and for the
most part had to be squared, and pressed, and
baked without sufficient straw; for this spinning
was weary work, the yarn being very bad and the
piecing of broken ends a never-ending labour.

It was about this time that the natural
balance between spinning and weaving was so
much disturbed. John Kay, of Bury, had
just invented the fly-shuttle, which enabled the
weaver to get through as much work again
as before; and he had been mobbed and nearly
killed for his pains. He escaped, wrapped up
in a sheet of cotton wool, and was thus carried
bodily through the mob by two of his friends
who did not think that an invention which
doubled work and production merited Lynch-law
condemnation. Poor Kay, after some more
vicissitudes, went to Paris, where be lived in
great poverty and distress, and where he finally
died in very painful circumstances. Robert Kay,
his son, in his turn invented the drop-box, by
means of which three spindles of different
coloured wefts could be used successively without
the trouble of replacing them on the lathe; and
thus weaving got another step forward. Robert
was not more popular than his father. He was
mobbed and insulted, his machines broken to
pieces, and himself dangerously threatened: for
was he not the natural enemy of the workmen,
and was it not worth a good day's work at any
time to harry and annoy one who had presumed
to invent anything that should lighten labour and
increase trade? By these inventions, then, weaving
had got the start of spinning, and there was not
enough weft to be had for the loom. The weavers
lost half their time in collecting their yarn ounce
by ounce from the cottages; and even then they
had to bribe the spinsters with all sorts of fair
words and fine promises, before they could get
enough of it to be of any use. Thus the barragons
and fustians, herringbones, thicksets, quiltings,
and cross-overs, dimities and velveteens,
for which Bolton was famous, and the checks
and greys dear to the soul of Blackburn, were
in an anomalous position; contravening the first
principle of political economy which asserts that
the demand creates the supply— that manufacture
ensures material. And thus weaving hands
were idle, and never knew their full tale of work;
and great hulking fellows were to be seen
everywhere lounging against the sunny south walls
about Bolton, talking a language which no one
but themselves could understand, or joking
roughly with the spinners as they came into
market with their bags and bales of coveted
yarn. That market indeed was an extraordinary
place, for the goods were mostly pitched into
he middle of the streets, though there were
halls, and warehouses, and places proper for
civiised traffic. But Bolton preferred the great
"moothall " common to all, and never cared to
transact its business under any other cover but
the sky or a public-house parlour. The "Bolton
chaps," as they are called to this day, were
always a queer, rough, unconventional set, and
in Samuel Crompton's time were even rougher
than at present.

To help remedy this disturbed balance,
Hargreaves then made his spinning-jenny, which
substituted eight spindles for one; afterwards
the eight spindles were raised to eighty; when
the sapient spinners took the alarm, and
after great rioting and bitter wrong-doing,
drove Hargreaves, broken-hearted, to Nottingham.
There he died in want and distress,
having first given up his jenny to the Strutts,
who made a practical thing of it, and made their
own fortunes at the same time. But the
spinning-jenny, though thoroughly successful in its
way, did not do everything; it did not make a
thread strong enough for the warp, but only
spun out additional weft; whereupon Richard
Arkwright, a barber at Bolton, great in the
secret of a certain hair-dye, great, too, in his
power of wheedling young women out of their
long back hair, turned his attention to mechanics
and the spinning-jenny, and invented a
spinning-frame, which drew the cotton from a
coarser to a finer and hard-twisted thread, and
so rendered it fit for warp as well as weft. But
something even yet remained. The thread broke
eternally; there was nothing but piecing together
the flying ends, and the work was for ever
stopping that the mending might be done. Also,
no machine yet made spun fine threads; and
the weavers were beginning to wish they could
rival the fine India muslins which came over
sparsely enough, but which commanded such
fabulous prices, and were so eagerly caught up
when they did come. A machine, then, that
could keep the thread from breaking, and that
could deliver a fine muslin thread, was now the
great thing to be next accomplished.

When Samuel Crompton was sixteen, he spun
on a jenny of eight spindles, and broke his heart
over the perpetual piecing of the broken ends.
They took up all his time, and stopped his
fiddle-playing for many a bitter evening. When he
was twenty-one, he began to think, says Mr.
French. His brain turned on improved spinning
machinery, and how he could make his
yarn go without this eternal breaking. And
he spent precious hours, and as Betty thought,
more precious money, in trying experiments of
all kinds, and at all times. The neighbours saw