worldly success; it was still more pre-eminently one of noble ends
and public usefulness. Many working men have raised themselves by
their own exertions to a position of wealth and dignity far
surpassing his; few indeed have conferred so many benefits upon
untold thousands of their fellow-men. It is impossible, even now,
to travel in any part of England, Wales, or Scotland, without
coming across innumerable memorials of Telford's great and useful
life; impossible to read the full record of his labours without
finding that numberless structures we have long admired for their
beauty or utility, owe their origin to the honourable, upright,
hardworking, thorough-going, journeyman mason of the quiet little
Eskdale village. Whether we go into the drained fens of
Lincolnshire, or traverse the broad roads of the rugged Snowdon
region; whether we turn to St. Katharine's Docks in London, or to
the wide quays of Dundee and those of Aberdeen; whether we sail
beneath the Menai suspension bridge at Bangor, or drive over the
lofty arches that rise sheer from the precipitous river gorge at
Cartland, we meet everywhere the lasting traces of that inventive
and ingenious brain. And yet, what lad could ever have started in
the world under apparently more hopeless circumstances than widow
Janet Telford's penniless orphan shepherd-boy Tam, in the bleakest
and most remote of all the lonely border valleys of southern
Scotland?






II.