imple luxury
that his small means would then permit him.

That, however, was not the end of George's misfortunes. Shortly after,
he was drawn by lot as a militiaman; and according to the law of that
time (for this was in 1807, during the very height of the wars against
Napoleon) he must either serve in person or else pay heavily to secure
a substitute. George chose regretfully the latter course--the only one
open to him if he wished still to support his parents and his infant
son. But in order to do so, he had to pay away the whole remainder of
his carefully hoarded savings, and even to borrow 6 pounds to make up
the payment for the substitute. It must have seemed very hard to him
to do this, and many men would have sunk under the blow, become
hopeless, or taken to careless rowdy drinking habits. George
Stephenson felt it bitterly, and gave way for a while to a natural
despondency; he would hardly have been human if he had not; but still,
he lived over it, and in the end worked on again with fuller resolution
and vigour than ever.

For several years Geordie, as his fellow-colliers affectionately called
him, continued to live on at one or other of the Killingworth
collieries. In a short time, he entered into a small contract with his
employers for "brakeing" the engines; and in the course of this
contract, he invented certain improvements in the matter of saving wear
and tear of ropes, which were both profitable to himself and also in
some small degree pointed the way toward his future plans for the
construction of railways. It is true, the two subjects have not,
apparently, much in common; but they are connected in this way, that
both proceed upon the principle of reducing the friction to the
smallest possible quantity. It was this principle that Stephenson was
gradually learning to appreciate more and more at its proper value; and
it was this which finally led him to the very summit of a great and
pre-eminently useful profession. The great advantage, indeed, of a
level railway over an up-and-down ordinary road is simply that in the
railway the resistance and friction are almost entirely got rid of.

It was in 1810, when Stephenson was twenty-nine, that his first
experiment in serious engineering was made. A coal-pit had been sunk
at Killingworth, and a rude steam-engine of that time had been set to
pump the water out of its shaft; but, somehow, the engine made no
headway against the rising springs at the b