Biographies of Working Men | Page 2

and her fatherless boy. The farmers about found
her work on their farms at haymaking or milking, and their wives took
the child home with them while its mother was busy labouring in the
harvest fields. Amid such small beginnings did the greatest of English
engineers before the railway era receive his first hard lessons in the art
of life.
After her husband's death, the poor widow removed from her old
cottage to a still more tiny hut, which she shared with a neighbour--a
very small hut, with a single door for both families; and here young
Tam Telford spent most of his boyhood in the quiet honourable poverty
of the uncomplaining rural poor. As soon as he was big enough to herd
sheep, he was turned out upon the hillside in summer like any other
ragged country laddie, and in winter he tended cows, receiving for
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 life, 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