Ellachie, and the bridge across the Dee, beneath the purple
heather-clad braes of Ballater. Altogether, on Telford's Highland
roads alone, there are no fewer than twelve hundred bridges.

Nor were these the only important labours by which Telford
ministered to the comfort and well-being of his Scotch fellow-
countrymen. Scotland's debt to the Eskdale stonemason is indeed
deep and lasting. While on land, he improved her communications by
his great lines of roads, which did on a smaller scale for the
Highland valleys what railways have since done for the whole of the
civilized world; he also laboured to improve her means of transit
at sea by constructing a series of harbours along that bare and
inhospitable eastern coast, once almost a desert, but now teeming
with great towns and prosperous industries. It was Telford who
formed the harbour of Wick, which has since grown from a miserable
fishing village into a large town, the capital of the North Sea
herring fisheries. It was he who enlarged the petty port of
Peterhead into the chief station of the flourishing whaling trade.
It was he who secured prosperity for Fraserburgh, and Banff, and
many other less important centres; while even Dundee and Aberdeen,
the chief commercial cities of the east coast, owe to him a large
part of their present extraordinary wealth and industry. When one
thinks how large a number of human beings have been benefited by
Telford's Scotch harbour works alone, it is impossible not to envy
a great engineer his almost unlimited power of permanent usefulness
to unborn thousands of his fellow-creatures.

As a canal-maker, Telford was hardly less successful than as a
constructor of roads and harbours. It is true, his greatest work
in this direction was in one sense a failure. He was employed by