iron horse," as people now began to style the altered and improved
locomotive. The Hetton railway was opened in 1822, and the assembled
crowd were delighted at beholding a single engine draw seventeen loaded
trucks after it, at the extraordinary rate of four miles an hour--nearly
as fast as a man could walk. Whence it may be gathered that Stephenson's
ideas upon the question of speed were still on a very humble scale
indeed.

Before the Hetton railway was opened, however, George Stephenson had
shown one more proof of his excellence as a father by sending his boy
Robert, now nineteen, to Edinburgh University. It was a serious expense
for a man who was even now, after all, hardly more than a working man of
the superior grade; but George Stephenson was well repaid for the
sacrifice he thus made on behalf of his only son. He lived to see him
the greatest practical engineer of his own time, and to feel that his
success was in large measure due to the wider and more accurate
scientific training the lad had received from his Edinburgh teachers.

In 1819 George married again, his second wife being the daughter of a
farmer at Black Callerton.

The work which finally secured the position of George Stephenson and of
his dearly loved locomotive was the Stockton and Darlington railway.
Like all the other early railways, it was originally projected simply as
a mineral line. Darlington lies in the centre of a rich inland mining
district; but the impossibility of getting the coal carried to the sea
by cart or donkey long prevented the opening up of its immense natural
wealth. At last, as early as 1817, Edward Pease and a few other
enterprising Darlington Quakers determined to build a line of railway
from the mining region to Stockton, on the river Tees, where the coal