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 at the magnificent wages of twopence a day, in the
village of Dewley Burn, close by, to which his father had then removed.
It might have seemed at first as though the future railway engineer was
going to settle down quietly to the useful but uneventful life of an
agricultural labourer; for from tending cows he proceeded in due time
(with a splendid advance of twopence) to leading the horses at the
plough, spudding thistles, and hoeing turnips on his employer's farm.
But the native bent of a powerful mind usually shows itself very early;
and even during the days when Geordie was still stumbling across the
freshly ploughed clods or driving the cows to pasture with a bunch of