"He was luckier than Crompton," replied her brother.
"Oh, tell us about Crompton. Do you remember anything about him?" Mary inquired.
"Crompton was one of the most important of the spinning inventors," continued Carl. "But he did not set out to be an inventor any more than Arkwright did. To be sure he wasn't a barber or anything as ordinary as that. He was a musician, a person of quite another sort, you see. His family were better bred and started him out with a good education—the very thing Arkwright lacked. Crompton might easily have mixed with the class Arkwright wanted to mix with but he wasn't as good a mixer. Instead of gossiping with everybody he met, as Arkwright had done, Crompton kept by himself and lived quietly at home with his mother."
"A sensible lad!" Mrs. McGregor whispered.
"Maybe," grinned her son. "Still, it made people call Crompton unsociable. I guess, though, most geniuses are that. They always seem to be so in books; and Crompton certainly was a genius. He hadn't an ounce of brain for business but he had no end of ideas; and it was those that got him on in life. For you see, although the Cromptons were what Ma would call 'gentle people', they were not rich. They were comfortably off, though, and if the father had not died when the children were small they might have been very well off indeed. As it was, Mrs. Crompton had to help out the finances by carding, spinning, and weaving cloth at home when her other work was done. Ever so many other women did it, so it was considered an all right thing to do. Since Kay's flying shuttle had made it possible to spin more stuff the weavers, as I told you, were scouring the country for all the warp and weft they could lay hands on, so everybody who could spin thread was sure of a market. The prices offered, and the difficulties the weavers were having to get material enough, were common talk at every English cottage fireside. So of course it wasn't strange that Mrs. Crompton, along with the rest of her neighbors, heard this gossip and also heard about Hargreaves's spinning jenny. Now Samuel helped his mother to spin evenings when he wasn't playing at the village theater and she decided it would be nice to get one of these spinning jennies for him to use. So she did, and it wasn't long before he could not only use it, but could turn out weft enough for cloth to clothe the whole Crompton family."
"Then I don't see but the Cromptons were nicely taken care of," Mary announced.
"That wasn't the point, smartie!" her brother objected. "Of course they were well enough off themselves, but the village of Bolton where they lived was strong on its muslins and quilt materials and what the people wanted was to be able to spin fine muslins such as were imported into England from India and China. If such goods could be made by uneducated Orientals why should not people as clever and ingenious as the English make them?"
"Why, indeed?"
"They couldn't do it; I don't know why," answered Carl. "They just could not contrive to draw fine enough thread. Of course Samuel Crompton had always seen the Bolton goods since he was a little boy and so knew as well as did everybody else in the town what a wonderful thing it would be if finer thread could be made. So after his mother got her spinning jenny for him he began to fuss round with it simply to find out whether he could make it any better or not. He experimented five years and at the end of that time he had made a 'muslin wheel' that was something like Arkwright's water frame and something like Hargreaves's jenny and yet wasn't like either of those things. Therefore, as a joke, it was called a 'mule.'"
"Oh, I'm awfully glad he made it!" ejaculated the sympathetic Mary. "Five years was such a long time to work. Wasn't it splendid of him!"