GEORGE STEPHENSON, ENGINE-MAN.





Any time about the year 1786, a stranger in the streets of the
grimy colliery village of Wylam, near Newcastle, might have passed
by without notice a ragged, barefooted, chubby child of five years
old, Geordie Stephenson by name, playing merrily in the gutter and
looking to the outward eye in no way different from any of the
other colliers' children who loitered about him. Nevertheless,
that ragged boy was yet destined in after-life to alter the whole
face of England and the world by those wonderful railways, which he
more than any other man was instrumental in first constructing; and
the story of his life may rank perhaps as one of the most marvellous
in the whole marvellous history of able and successful British
working men.

George Stephenson was born in June, 1781, the son of a fireman who
tended the pumping engine of the neighbouring colliery, and one of
a penniless family of six children. So poor was his father,
indeed, that the whole household lived in a single room, with bare
floor and mud wall; and little Geordie grew up in his own unkempt
fashion without any schooling whatever, not even knowing A from B
when he was a big lad of seventeen. At an age when he ought to
have been learning his letters, he was bird's-nesting in the fields
or running errands to the Wylam shops; and as soon as he was old
enough to earn a few pence by light work, he was set to tend cows