instruction. So the good father worked hard to send
his boy to school; not to the village teacher's only, but to a school
for gentlemen's sons at Newcastle. By mending clocks and watches in
spare moments, and by rigid economy in all unnecessary expenses
(especially beer), Stephenson had again gathered together a little
hoard, which mounted up this time to a hundred guineas. A hundred
guineas is a fortune and a capital to a working man. He was therefore
rich enough, not only to send little Robert to school, but even to buy
him a donkey, on which the boy made the journey every day from
Killingworth to Newcastle. This was in 1815, when George was
thirty-four, and Robert twelve. Perhaps no man who ever climbed so
high as George Stephenson, had ever reached so little of the way at so
comparatively late an age. For in spite of his undoubted success,
viewed from the point of view of his origin and early prospects, he was
as yet after all nothing more than the common engine-wright of the
Killingworth collieries--a long way off as yet from the distinguished
father of the railway system.

George Stephenson's connection with the locomotive, however, was even
now beginning. Already, in 1816, he and his boy had tried a somewhat
higher flight of mechanical and scientific skill than usual, in the
construction of a sun-dial, which involves a considerable amount of
careful mathematical work; and now George found that the subject of
locomotive engines was being forced by circumstances upon his
attention. From the moment he was appointed engine-wright of the
Killingworth collieries, he began to think about all possible means of
hauling coal at cheaper rates from the pit's mouth to the shipping
place on the river. For that humble object alone--an object that lay
wholly within the line of his own special business--did the great
railway projector set out upon his investigations into the
possibilities of the locomotive. Indeed, in its earliest origin, the
locomotive was almost entirely connected with coals and mining; its
application to passenger traffic on the large scale was quite a later
and secondary consideration. It was only by accident, so to speak,
that the true capabilities of railways were finally discovered in the
actual course of their practical employment.

George Stephenson was not the first person to construct either a
locomotive or a tramway. Both were already in use, in more or less
rude forms, at several colli