Amid such small beginnings did the greatest of English engineers before
the railway era receive his first hard lessons in the art of life.

After her husband's death, the poor widow removed from her old cottage
to a still more tiny hut, which she shared with a neighbour--a very
small hut, with a single door for both families; and here young Tam
Telford spent most of his boyhood in the quiet honourable poverty of the
uncomplaining rural poor. As soon as he was big enough to herd sheep, he
was turned out upon the hillside in summer like any other ragged country
laddie, and in winter he tended cows, receiving for wages only his food
and money enough to cover the cost of his scanty clothing. He went to
school, too; how, nobody now knows: but he _did_ go, to the parish
school of Westerkirk, and there he learnt with a will, in the winter
months, though he had to spend the summer on the more profitable task of
working in the fields. To a steady earnest boy like young Tam Telford,
however, it makes all the difference in the world that he should have
been to school, no matter how simply. Those twenty-six letters of the
alphabet, once fairly learnt, are the key, after all, to all the book-
learning in the whole world. Without them, the shepherd-boy might remain
an ignorant, unprogressive shepherd all his life long, even his
undeniable native energy using itself up on nothing better than a
wattled hurdle or a thatched roof; with them, the path is open before
him which led Tam Telford at last to the Menai Bridge and Westminster
Abbey.

When Tam had gradually eaten his way through enough thin oatmeal
porridge (with very little milk, we fear) to make him into a hearty lad
of fifteen, it began to be high time for him to choose himself a final
profession in life, such as he was able. And here already the born
tastes of the boy began to show themselves: for he had no liking for the