hazel twigs, his taste for mechanics already made itself felt in a very
marked and practical fashion. During all his leisure time, the future
engineer and his chum Bill Thirlwall occupied themselves with making
clay models of engines, and fitting up a winding machine with corks and
twine like those which lifted the colliery baskets. Though Geordie
Stephenson didn't go to school at the village teacher's, he was teaching
himself in his own way by close observation and keen comprehension of
all the machines and engines he could come across.

Naturally, to such a boy, the great ambition of his life was to be
released from the hoeing and spudding, and set to work at his father's
colliery. Great was Geordie's joy, therefore, when at last he was taken
on there in the capacity of a coal-picker, to clear the loads from
stones and rubbish. It wasn't a very dignified position, to be sure, but
it was the first step that led the way to the construction of the
Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Geordie was now fairly free from the
uncongenial drudgery of farm life, and able to follow his own
inclinations in the direction of mechanical labour. Besides, was he not
earning the grand sum of sixpence a day as picker, increased to
eightpence a little later on, when he rose to the more responsible and
serious work of driving the gin-horse? A proud day indeed it was for him
when, at fourteen, he was finally permitted to aid his father in firing
the colliery engine; though he was still such a very small boy that he
used to run away and hide when the owner went his rounds of inspection,
for fear he should be thought too little to earn his untold wealth of a
shilling a day in such a grown-up occupation. Humbler beginnings were
never any man's who lived to become the honoured guest, not of kings and
princes only, but of the truly greatest and noblest in the land.

A coal-miner's life is often a very shifting one; for the coal in