I.

THOMAS TELFORD, STONEMASON.





High up among the heather-clad hills which form the broad dividing
barrier between England and Scotland, the little river Esk brawls
and bickers over its stony bed through a wild land of barren
braesides and brown peat mosses, forming altogether some of the
gloomiest and most forbidding scenery in the whole expanse of
northern Britain. Almost the entire bulk of the counties of
Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, and Ayr is composed of just such solemn
desolate upland wolds, with only a few stray farms or solitary
cottages sprinkled at wide distances over their bare bleak surface,
and with scarcely any sign of life in any part save the little
villages which cluster here and there at long intervals around some
stern and simple Scottish church. Yet the hardy people who inhabit
this wild and chilly moorland country may well be considered to rank
among the best raw material of society in the whole of Britain; for
from the peasant homes of these southern Scotch Highlands have come
forth, among a host of scarcely less distinguished natives, three
men, at least, who deserve to take their place in the very front
line of British thinkers or workers--Thomas Telford, Robert Burns,
and Thomas Carlyle. By origin, all three alike belonged in the very
strictest sense to the working classes; and the story of each is
full of lessons or of warnings for every one of us: but that of