[Illustration:  ELIAS HOWE, JR.]

CHAPTER XVII.

ELIAS HOWE, JR.

One of the busiest parts of the busy thoroughfare of Broadway, in the city of New York, is the point of its intersection with Fourth Street.  Thousands and tens of thousands of people pass and repass there daily, but few ever pause to look at the curious machine which stands in the window of the shop at the north-west corner of these two streets.  This machine, clumsy and odd-looking as it is, nevertheless has a history which makes it one of the most interesting of all the sights of the great city.  It is the first sewing-machine that was ever made.

ELIAS HOWE, its maker, was born in the town of Spencer, Massachusetts, in 1819.  He was one of eight children, and it was no small undertaking on the part of his father to provide a maintenance for such a household.  Mr. Howe, Sen., was a farmer and miller, and, as was the custom at that time in the country towns of New England, carried on in his family some of those minor branches of industry suited to the capacity of children, with which New England abounds.  When Elias was six years old, he was set, with his brothers and sisters, to sticking wire teeth through the leather straps used for making cotton cards.  When he became old enough he assisted his father in his saw-mill and grist-mill, and during the winter months picked up a meager education at the district school.  He has said that it was the rude and imperfect mills of his father that first turned his attention to machinery.  He was not fitted for hard work, however, as he was frail in constitution and incapable of bearing much fatigue.  Moreover, he inherited a species of lameness which proved a great obstacle to any undertaking on his part, and gave him no little trouble all through life.  At the age of eleven he went to live out on the farm of a neighbor, but the labor proving too severe for him, he returned home and resumed his place in his father’s mills, where he remained until he was sixteen years old.

When at this age, he conceived an ardent desire to go to Lowell to seek his fortune.  One of his friends had just returned from that place, and had given him such a wonderful description of the city and its huge mills, that he was eager to go there and see the marvel for himself.  Obtaining his father’s consent, he went to Lowell, and found employment as a learner in one of the large cotton-mills of the city.  He remained there two years, when the great financial disaster of 1837 threw him out of employment and compelled him to look for work elsewhere.  He obtained a place at Cambridge, in a machine-shop, and was put to work upon the new hemp-carding machinery of Professor Treadwell.  His cousin, Nathaniel P. Banks, afterward governor of Massachusetts, member of Congress, and major-general, worked in the same shop with him, and boarded at the same house.  Howe remained in Cambridge only a few months, however, and was then given a place in the machine-shop of Ari Davis, of Boston.