beneath the
Menai suspension bridge at Bangor, or drive over the lofty arches that
rise sheer from the precipitous river gorge at Cartland, we meet
everywhere the lasting traces of that inventive and ingenious brain.
And yet, what lad could ever have started in the world under apparently
more hopeless circumstances than widow Janet Telford's penniless orphan
shepherd-boy Tam, in the bleakest and most remote of all the lonely
border valleys of southern Scotland?

II.

GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN.

Any time about the year 1786, a stranger in the streets of the grimy
colliery village of Wylam, near Newcastle, might have passed by without
notice a ragged, barefooted, chubby child of five years old, Geordie
Stephenson by name, playing merrily in the gutter and looking to the
outward eye in no way different from any of the other colliers'
children who loitered about him. Nevertheless, that ragged boy was yet
destined in after-life to alter the whole face of England and the world
by those wonderful railways, which he more than any other man was
instrumental in first constructing; and the story of his life may rank
perhaps as one of the most marvellous in the whole marvellous history
of able and successful British working men.

George Stephenson was born in June, 1781, the son of a fireman who
tended the pumping engine of the neighbouring colliery, and one of a
penniless family of six children. So poor was his father, indeed, that
the whole household lived in a single room, with bare floor and mud
wall; and little Geordie grew up in his own unkempt fashion without any
schooling whatever, not even knowing A from B when he was a big lad of
seventeen. At an age when he ought to have been learning his letters,
he was bird's-nesting in the fields or running errands to the Wylam
shops; and as soon as he was old enough to earn a few pence by light
work, he was set to tend cows at the magnificent wages of twopence a
day, in the village of Dewley Burn, close by, to which his father had
then removed. It might have seemed at first as though the future
railway engineer was going to settle down quietly to the useful but
uneventful life of an agricultural labourer; for from tending cows he
proceeded in due time (with a splendid advance of twopence) to leading
the horses at the plough, spudding thistles, and hoeing turnips on his
employer's farm. But the native bent of a powerful mind usually shows
itself very early; and e