e, first as an apprentice, and afterwards as a journeyman
mason of the humblest type. He had a good mother, and he was a good
son. On Saturday nights he generally managed to walk over to the
cottage at Westerkirk, and accompany the poor widow to the Sunday
services at the parish kirk. As long as she lived, indeed, he never
forgot her; and one of the first tasks he set himself when he was out
of his indentures was to cut a neat headstone with a simple but
beautiful inscription for the grave of that shepherd father whom he had
practically never seen. At Langholm, an old maiden lady, Miss Pasley,
interested herself kindly in Janet Telford's rising boy. She lent him
what of all things the eager lad most needed--books; and the young
mason applied himself to them in all his spare moments with the
vigorous ardour and perseverance of healthy youth. The books he read
were not merely those which bore directly or indirectly upon his own
craft: if they had been, Tam Telford might have remained nothing more
than a journeyman mason all the days of his life. It is a great
mistake, even from the point of view of mere worldly success, for a
young man to read or learn only what "pays" in his particular calling;
the more he reads and learns, the more will he find that seemingly
useless things "pay" in the end, and that what apparently pays least,
often really pays most in the long run. This is not the only or the
best reason why every man should aim at the highest possible
cultivation of his own talents, be they what they may; but it is in
itself a very good reason, and it is a sufficient answer for those who
would deter us from study of any high kind on the ground that it "does
no good." Telford found in after-life that his early acquaintance with
sound English literature did do him a great deal of good: it opened and
expanded his mind; it trained his intelligence; it stored his brain
with images and ideas which were ever after to him a source of
unmitigated delight and unalloyed pleasure. He read whenever he had
nothing else to do. He read Milton with especial delight; and he also
read the verses that his fellow-countryman, Rob Burns, the Ayrshire
ploughman, was then just beginning to speak straight to the heart of
every aspiring Scotch peasant lad. With these things Tam Telford
filled the upper stories of his brain quite as much as with the trade
details of his own particular useful handicraft; and the result soon
showed tha