r
wages only his food and money enough to cover the cost of his scanty
clothing. He went to school, too; how, nobody now knows: but he DID
go, to the parish school of Westerkirk, and there he learnt with a
will, in the winter months, though he had to spend the summer on the
more profitable task of working in the fields. To a steady earnest boy
like young Tam Telford, however, it makes all the difference in the
world that he should have been to school, no matter how simply. Those
twenty-six letters of the alphabet, once fairly learnt, are the key,
after all, to all the book-learning in the whole world. Without them,
the shepherd-boy might remain an ignorant, unprogressive shepherd all
his life long, even his undeniable native energy using itself up on
nothing better than a wattled hurdle or a thatched roof; with them, the
path is open before him which led Tam Telford at last to the Menai
Bridge And Westminster Abbey.

When Tam had gradually eaten his way through enough thin oatmeal
porridge (with very little milk, we fear) to make him into a hearty lad
of fifteen, it began to be high time for him to choose himself a final
profession in life, such as he was able. And here already the born
tastes of the boy began to show themselves: for he had no liking for
the homely shepherd's trade; he felt a natural desire for a chisel and
a hammer--the engineer was there already in the grain--and he was
accordingly apprenticed to a stonemason in the little town of
Lochmaben, beyond the purple hills to eastward. But his master was a
hard man; he had small mercy for the raw lad; and after trying to
manage with him for a few months, Tam gave it up, took the law into his
own hands, and ran away. Probably the provocation was severe, for in
after-life Telford always showed himself duly respectful to constituted
authority; and we know that petty self-made master-workmen are often
apt to be excessively severe to their own hired helpers, and especially
to helpless lads or young apprentices. At any rate, Tam wouldn't go
back; and in the end, a well-to-do cousin, who had risen to the proud
position of steward at the great hall of the parish, succeeded in
getting another mason at Langholm, the little capital of Eskdale, to
take over the runaway for the remainder of the term of his indentures.

At Langholm, a Scotch country town of the quietest and sleepiest
description, Tam Telford passed the next eight years of his uneventful
early lif