The spinning jenny spun good woof. The water frame spun good warp. But neither of these inventions spun yarn fine enough to weave muslin. All the muslin of the day came from India. The Hindu spinners were so skillful that they could make the very finest yarn, even on the spinning wheel. The spinning machine which broke India's hold on the muslin trade was the mule, invented in 1779 by Samuel Crompton, another Englishman.

From early childhood Samuel helped his widowed mother, who supported her only son and her two daughters by keeping a cow or two, by having a good garden, and by spinning and weaving. Samuel's "little legs became accustomed to the loom almost as soon as they were long enough to touch the treadles." Yet he went to school regularly, and was given a good education. Going to school did not, however, relieve him from a certain amount of spinning and weaving each day. His mother was in her way loving and kind, but woe unto Samuel if his daily amount of spinning and weaving was not done.

Whether or not the eight-spindle jenny used by Samuel was a poor one, much of his time was taken up in "mending the ever-breaking ends of his miserable yarn." To escape the reproach of his exacting mother, it kept him forever busy to do the allotted stint of spinning and weaving. Then, too, Samuel was an excellent workman. It may be that he longed to weave cloth as beautiful and delicate as the muslins of India. At any rate, by the time he was twenty-one years of age, he began to think how a better spinning machine than the jenny could be made.

Most inventors are inspired by the hope that from their inventions they will gain both fame and wealth. From childhood, Crompton had been much alone. Spinning and weaving was not then, as now, done in big factories. He knew very little about the world, and less about how valuable a great invention might be.

Crompton worked on the new machine from the time he was twenty-one until he was twenty-six. He says: "The next five years had this . . . added to my labor as a weaver . . . , a continuous endeavor to make a more perfect spinning machine. Though often baffled, I as often renewed the attempt, and at length succeeded to my utmost desire, at the expense of every shilling I had in the world." It might be added, at the expense also of the good will of his neighbors.

Strange sounds were heard coming from Crompton's home. Lights were seen at all hours of the night. The rumor went about that the house was haunted. It was soon discovered that Crompton was the ghost. But when relieved of their fears of a ghost, the neighbors found that they had in their midst a "conjuror," the term of contempt applied to an inventor. So Crompton became an object of suspicion.

Hardly was the first mule completed, when the anti-machine riots of 1779 broke out. Mobs of spinners and weavers went about crying, "Men, not machines." Rioters went everywhere, destroying all the jennies and water frames they could lay their hands on, especially all jennies having more than twenty spindles. The usual number was eighty. Crompton knew that his invention would arouse the rioters even more than the jenny or the water frame. Fearing that they would destroy it, he took it to pieces and hid it in the garret of his workroom. There it lay for weeks, before he had courage to bring it down and put it together. He now learned for the first time what his machine would do. After a little practice, he could spin yarn on it fine enough for the most delicate muslin.

His invention is called the mule, because it combines in one machine the best points in Arkwright's water frame and the best points in Hargreaves' spinning jenny. this, the greatest length of yarn ever spun from a pound of cotton was less than 70,000 yards. With the mule, it was possible to spin, from a single pound of cotton, a thread 300,000 yards in length.

Crompton's only idea in inventing the mule, as stated before, was to make a machine for his own use. The way before him now seemed clear, and he married. For a few months he prospered, and he and his wife were happy. But such a valuable invention could not be kept a secret long. Crompton's yarn was the finest that came to the market, and he received the highest price for it.

His neighbors began to ask, "How can Sam Crompton make such fine yarn? He must have a new kind of spinning machine." Some of them went to his home to see. Crompton, of course, tried to keep them from learning about his invention. He wanted to be let alone, so that he might reap the fruits of his labor. He even went so far as to put a special lock on his workroom, and to put screens at the windows. But his neighbors were not to be outdone. They called at unexpected times. They even brought ladders and looked over the screens. One fellow, it is said, lay in the loft overhead for days, and peeped down through a knot hole.

This spying almost drove Crompton mad. He even thought of breaking his invention to pieces. "A few months reduced me," he afterwards wrote, "to the cruel necessity either of destroying my machine altogether or of giving it up to the public. It was not in my power to keep it and work it. To destroy it, I could not think of that; to give up that for which I had labored so long was cruel. I had no patent nor the means of purchasing one. In preference to destroying it, I gave it to the public."

To induce him to do this, some manufacturers promised to raise a liberal purse. The total subscription amounted to only about three hundred and thirty dollars, but no sooner was the invention made public than the subscriptions stopped. Worse still, some of the subscribers refused to pay what they had promised. Crompton scarcely received enough to make him a new mule, for he had given up to the manufacturers the one he was working with, to be used by them as a model in making others.

The first mule was a crude affair, and had not more than twenty or thirty spindles. Mules of to-day are among our most beautifully constructed machines, and some of them carry a thousand spindles. The mule, like the jenny, was first worked by a spinner, but to-day they are self-acting, that is, they work themselves. The mule as thus improved is the most wonderful of all spinning machines, and is used the world over, to spin both the warp and the woof of all the finer kinds of cotton goods, and the woof of the coarser cotton cloth.

Crompton did not go wholly unrewarded, however. In part payment for the benefits of his invention, Parliament voted him twenty-five thousand dollars. But this was soon wasted by his sons in business. A few years before his death he almost came to want. Some admiring friends then raised by private subscription a fund which gave him an annual income of three hundred dollars. Without this, he would probably have died in poverty.