healthy youth. The books he read were not merely those which bore
directly or indirectly upon his own craft: if they had been, Tam Telford
might have remained nothing more than a journeyman mason all the days of
his life. It is a great mistake, even from the point of view of mere
worldly success, for a young man to read or learn only what "pays" in
his particular calling; the more he reads and learns, the more will he
find that seemingly useless things "pay" in the end, and that what
apparently pays least, often really pays most in the long run. This is
not the only or the best reason why every man should aim at the highest
possible cultivation of his own talents, be they what they may; but it
is in itself a very good reason, and it is a sufficient answer for those
who would deter us from study of any high kind on the ground that it
"does no good." Telford found in after-life that his early acquaintance
with sound English literature did do him a great deal of good: it opened
and expanded his mind; it trained his intelligence; it stored his brain
with images and ideas which were ever after to him a source of
unmitigated delight and unalloyed pleasure. He read whenever he had
nothing else to do. He read Milton with especial delight; and he also
read the verses that his fellow-countryman, Rob Burns, the Ayrshire
ploughman, was then just beginning to speak straight to the heart of
every aspiring Scotch peasant lad. With these things Tam Telford filled
the upper stories of his brain quite as much as with the trade details
of his own particular useful handicraft; and the result soon showed that
therein Tam Telford had not acted uncannily or unwisely.

Nor did he read only; he wrote too--verses, not very good, nor yet very
bad, but well expressed, in fairly well chosen language, and with due
regard to the nice laws of metre and of grammar, which is in itself a
great point. Writing verse is an occupation at which only very few even
among men of literary education ever really succeed; and nine-tenths of