twaddle, quite unworthy of being put into the dignity of print.
Yet Telford did well for all that in trying his hand, with but poor
result, at this most difficult and dangerous of all the arts. His
rhymes were worth nothing as rhymes; but they were worth a great
deal as discipline and training: they helped to form the man, and
that in itself is always something. Most men who have in them the
power to do any great thing pass in early life through a verse-
making stage. The verses never come to much; but they leave their
stamp behind them; and the man is all the better in the end for
having thus taught himself the restraint, the command of language,
the careful choice of expressions, the exercise of deliberate pains
in composition, which even bad verse-making necessarily implies.
It is a common mistake of near-sighted minds to look only at the
immediate results of things, without considering their remoter
effects. When Tam Telford, stonemason of Langholm, began at
twenty-two years of age to pen poetical epistles to Robert Burns,
most of his fellow-workmen doubtless thought he was giving himself
up to very foolish and nonsensical practices; but he was really
helping to educate Thomas Telford, engineer of the Holyhead Road
and the Caledonian Canal, for all his future usefulness and
greatness.

As soon as Tam was out of his indentures, he began work as a
journeyman mason at Langholm on his own account, at the not very
magnificent wages of eighteenpence a day. That isn't much; but at
any rate it is an independence. Besides building many houses in
his own town, Tam made here his first small beginning in the matter
of roads and highways, by helping to build a bridge over the Esk at
Langholm. He was very proud of his part in this bridge, and to the
end of his life he often referred to it as his first serious