comfort and opulence; growing big pines and melons, keeping birds
and dogs, and indulging himself towards the end in the well-earned
repose to which his useful and laborious life fully entitled him.
At last, on the 12th of August, 1848, he died suddenly of
intermittent fever, in his sixty-seventh year, and was peacefully
buried in Chesterfield church. Probably no one man who ever lived
did so much to change and renovate the whole aspect of human life
as George Stephenson; and, unlike many other authors of great
revolutions, he lived long enough to see the full result of his
splendid labours in the girdling of England by his iron roads. A
grand and simple man, he worked honestly and steadfastly throughout
his days, and he found his reward in the unprecedented benefits
which his locomotive was even then conferring upon his fellow-men.
It is indeed wonderful to think how very different is the England
in which we live to-day, from that in which we might possibly have
been living were it not for the barefooted little collier boy who
made clay models of engines at Wylam, and who grew at last into the
great and famous engineer of the marvellous Liverpool and Manchester
railway. The main characteristic of George Stephenson was
perseverance; and it was that perseverance that enabled him at last
to carry out his magnificent schemes in the face of so much bitter
and violent opposition.






III.