confidence he might now consider himself a rich man.

By the time George was twenty-one, he had saved up enough by constant
care to feel that he might safely embark on the sea of housekeeping. He
was able to take a small cottage lodging for himself and Fanny, at
Willington Quay, near his work at the moment, and to furnish it with the
simple comfort which was all that their existing needs demanded. He
married Fanny on the 28th of November, 1802; and the young couple
proceeded at once to their new home. Here George laboured harder than
ever, as became the head of a family. He was no more ashamed of odd jobs
than he had been of learning the alphabet. He worked overtime at
emptying ballast from ships; he continued to cobble, to cut lasts, and
even to try his hand at regular shoemaking; furthermore, he actually
acquired the art of mending clocks, a matter which lay strictly in his
own line, and he thus earned a tidy penny at odd hours by doctoring all
the rusty or wheezy old timepieces of all his neighbours. Nor did he
neglect his mechanical education meanwhile; for he was always at work
upon various devices for inventing a perpetual motion machine. Now
perpetual motion is the most foolish will-o'-the-wisp that ever engaged
a sane man's attention: the thing has been proved to be impossible from
every conceivable point of view, and the attempt to achieve it, if
pursued to the last point, can only end in disappointment if not in
ruin. Still, for all that, the work George Stephenson spent upon this
unpractical object did really help to give him an insight into
mechanical science which proved very useful to him at a later date. He
didn't discover perpetual motion, but he did invent at last the real
means for making the locomotive engine a practical power in the matter
of travelling.

A year later, George's only son Robert was born; and from that moment