Near by, is still another room, where "jacking" is carried on. This is simply placing the machines, while being put together, upon jacks and setting them to "running" at a great speed to see if the parts will work. After 5 this each machine is set to sewing a little to see if it is capable of doing the work for which it is intended when it shall go out into the world.

The first attempts at devising the sewing machine were made somewhere about the year 1830, but these were un10 successful, and the inventors died without gaining any benefit from their labors.

In 1843, Elias Howe, of Massachusetts, invented a machine, which, after many trials, hampered with excessive poverty, he at length succeeded in bringing into use, in 15 1846.

The story of this man's career, which you would do well to read, is a striking chapter in the annals of intelligent labor, and well illustrates what perseverance will do, by carrying out its purpose through disappointment, 20 hindrance, and want of means, till at length success is reached in spite of everything.

HELPS FOR STUDY

What is done with every separate piece of a sewing machine before it is pronounced perfect?

What is meant by "gauged"?

What is "japanning"?

What is done in order to see if all parts of a machine will work?
What are "jacks"?

Who invented the first successful sewing-machine?

Name some other well-known makes of sewing-machines now on the market?

COAL

Did you ever stop to think when you have watched some railway engine puff out of its round-house home, or whiz away over the country with its precious freight; or when you have visited some noisy mill or foundry, what a vast 5 amount of coal it must take to turn so much machinery?

Coal is to our manufactories what the main-spring is to the watch, and hardly any labor can be performed without it. Yet, before we can have so much as a hod of coal, mines have to be mapped out by skillful men; tunnels made 10 or deep shafts sunk; gear fixed to bring the coal up; means tried to drain and air the pits; miners paid for their hard toil and risk of life, and trucks and wagons made to carry the coal. Then there must be roads made to reach the seaports; ships to carry the coal over the water, and railways 15 to take it from place to place over the land.

Every step of this work is costly. The sinking of a shaft or pit is very expensive labor, and some pits have been bored very deep without coming to coal. Often after it has been carried hundreds of miles, the coal has to be 20 taken out of the coal ships (colliers), put into barges or lighters to go up the rivers; or, perhaps, is transported to some railway again. Last of all, comes the business of the coal markets, the merchants and small dealers, who bring the coal to our cellars.

25

Have you noticed that some coal burns with a great deal of flame and smoke? That is because it is rich in mineral pitch or bitumen; it is called bituminous coal. That hard, stony, clean-looking coal, which burns with such a feeble flame, yet gives out such intense heat when 30 once it is lighted, is the anthracite coal.

Until closed stoves and the hot blast for furnaces came into use, anthracite was but little used for fuel, as it does not light easily and requires a strong draught to keep it burning.

The countless uses of coal! How they show the power man has to turn the knowledge and skill he acquires by study, hard work, and obervation to good account. This one product of the earth, by means of man's intelligence, has made a complete change in the industries of our 10 country.

15

It is only a few hundred years since the motive power of steam was called forth by coal. Now nearly every country is scored with steam railways; and our mills and factories are crowded with steam engines and looms.

Before coal was used to produce steam the sites for busy towns were selected near some mill stream, and the woods were seats for smelting iron. Now iron-making has gone to the coal-fields, where the coal, the iron ore, and the lime-stone, or flux, which helps to melt the iron, are all 20 found close together.

25

Coal is used in such great quantities, that some people have thought the supply might give out. But there is very little danger of this. In the first place, think of the coal area of our own land!

There are the great coal-fields bordering the Appalachian Mountains, reaching from the north line of Pennsylvania to the middle of Alabama, 58,737 square miles; the Illinois coal-field, which covers a large part of Illinois and portions of Indiana and Kentucky, its area 64,887 square 30 miles; the Missouri coal-field, lying west of the Mississippi, in the States of Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri and Texas, supposed to extend over 47,138 square miles. Added to this are the anthracite basins of Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and the coal-fields of Virginia, Michigan 35 and North Carolina.

10

Then there are the coal mines of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in Canada, and in our own territory of Alaska there are enormous deposits.

England, France, Prussia, Belgium, and Australia are 5 also rich in coal, but the supply of North America far exceeds that of European countries, both in quantity and quality. New deposits are being discovered every year, and the annual output of bituminous coal can be maintained for hundreds of years without exhausting the supply.

The first coal discovered in America was by Father Hennepin, the Mississippi explorer, near what is now Ottawa, in Illinois. In the year 1813 the first mining was begun, when five boat-loads of coal were floated down the Lehigh River, and sold for twenty-one dollars per ton in 15 Philadelphia.

Regular shipments from the Pennsylvania mines began in 1820, and the industry has steadily grown, until the amount carried over the different railroads or by vessels connecting with the coal regions has reached nearly 20 five hundred millions of tons a year.

HELPS FOR STUDY

How is coal obtained?

How does it make the locomotive run and the machinery turn?
What kinds of coal are there?

What is bituminous coal? Anthracite coal?

Which kind is used in our homes for cooking and heating?

For what purposes is the bituminous coal used?

Why were the sites for busy towns chosen near mill streams before

coal was used to produce steam?

Where are the great coal regions of the United States?
Who was Father Hennepin?

WHAT IS COAL?

What is coal? How came we to know that if we bored pits a quarter of a mile deep, and sometimes deeper, into the earth, we should find a black stone that would burn and be so useful for fuel? Coal is found in seams or beds. 5 In some coal-fields, as many as eighty of these beds have been counted, and in some other places double this number. Some of the seams are as thin as a leaf, and they range through every thickness to nearly thirty feet. The beds are not dug out for fuel unless they reach a thickness of two 10 or three feet at least, as they would not pay for working. The seams or beds are called measures, and if they had lain flat in the crust of the earth, it is pretty certain that we should never have known much about them. But the coal measures are not flat; they slope or dip, and stretch upward 15 as well as downward, and the edge of the coal bed, here and there, crops out on the surface. This surface coal is not as good as the deep-seated coal, but it was the first used, and it shows the direction of the slope or dip.

When once this slope was found, it was easier to sink a 20 shaft down to the coal, the depth of which was reckoned beforehand, than to keep digging the coal deeper and deeper from the spot where it cropped out.

In Belgium the coal measures are tilted nearly upright, and, therefore, must be dug from the surface downward, 25 deeper and deeper. There is a mine in Middle Island, New Zealand, fifty feet thick and three thousand feet above the sea level. Here the fuel is tunneled out, no shafts are sunk, and there are no explosions of fire-damp, the filled trucks going down the slope of the mountain pull 30 up at the same time a train of empty ones to be filled.