ven during the days when Geordie was still
stumbling across the freshly ploughed clods or driving the cows to
pasture with a bunch of hazel twigs, his taste for mechanics already
made itself felt in a very marked and practical fashion. During all
his leisure time, the future engineer and his chum Bill Thirlwall
occupied themselves with making clay models of engines, and fitting up
a winding machine with corks and twine like those which lifted the
colliery baskets. Though Geordie Stephenson didn't go to school at the
village teacher's, he was teaching himself in his own way by close
observation and keen comprehension of all the machines and engines he
could come across.

Naturally, to such a boy, the great ambition of his life was to be
released from the hoeing and spudding, and set to work at his father's
colliery. Great was Geordie's joy, therefore, when at last he was
taken on there in the capacity of a coal-picker, to clear the loads
from stones and rubbish. It wasn't a very dignified position, to be
sure, but it was the first step that led the way to the construction of
the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Geordie was now fairly free from
the uncongenial drudgery of farm life, and able to follow his own
inclinations in the direction of mechanical labour. Besides, was he
not earning the grand sum of sixpence a day as picker, increased to
eightpence a little later on, when he rose to the more responsible and
serious work of driving the gin-horse? A proud day indeed it was for
him when, at fourteen, he was finally permitted to aid his father in
firing the colliery engine; though he was still such a very small boy
that he used to run away and hide when the owner went his rounds of
inspection, for fear he should be thought too little to earn his untold
wealth of a shilling a day in such a grown-up occupation. Humbler
beginnings were never any man's who lived to become the honoured guest,
not of kings and princes only, but of the truly greatest and noblest in
the land.

A coal-miner's life is often a very shifting one; for the coal in
particular collieries gets worked out from time to time; and he has to
remove, accordingly, to fresh quarters, wherever employment happens to
be found. This was very much the case with George Stephenson and his
family; all of them being obliged to remove several times over during
his childish days in search of new openings. Shortly after Geordie had
attained to the responsible p