yet read; and he found this terrible drawback told fatally against his
further progress. Whenever he wanted to learn something that he didn't
quite understand, he was always referred for information to a Book. Oh,
those books; those mysterious, unattainable, incomprehensible books; how
they must have bothered and worried poor intelligent and aspiring but
still painfully ignorant young George Stephenson! Though he was already
trying singularly valuable experiments in his own way, he hadn't yet
even begun to learn his letters.

Under these circumstances, George Stephenson, eager and anxious for
further knowledge, took a really heroic resolution. He wasn't ashamed to
go to school. Though now a full workman on his own account, about
eighteen years old, he began to attend the night school at the
neighbouring village of Walbottle, where he took lessons in reading
three evenings every week. It is a great thing when a man is not ashamed
to learn. Many men are; they consider themselves so immensely wise that
they look upon it as an impertinence in anybody to try to tell them
anything they don't know already. Truly wise or truly great men--men
with the capability in them for doing anything worthy in their
generation--never feel this false and foolish shame. They know that most
other people know some things in some directions which they do not, and
they are glad to be instructed in them whenever opportunity offers. This
wisdom George Stephenson possessed in sufficient degree to make him feel
more ashamed of his ignorance than of the steps necessary in order to
conquer it. Being a diligent and willing scholar, he soon learnt to
read, and by the time he was nineteen he had learnt how to write also.
At arithmetic, a science closely allied to his native mechanical bent,
he was particularly apt, and beat all the other scholars at the village
night school. This resolute effort at education was the real turning-
point in George Stephenson's remarkable career, the first step on the