published verse is mere mediocre twaddle, quite unworthy of being put
into the dignity of print. Yet Telford did well for all that in trying
his hand, with but poor result, at this most difficult and dangerous of
all the arts. His rhymes were worth nothing as rhymes; but they were
worth a great deal as discipline and training: they helped to form the
man, and that in itself is always something. Most men who have in them
the power to do any great thing pass in early life through a verse-
making stage. The verses never come to much; but they leave their stamp
behind them; and the man is all the better in the end for having thus
taught himself the restraint, the command of language, the careful
choice of expressions, the exercise of deliberate pains in composition,
which even bad verse-making necessarily implies. It is a common mistake
of near-sighted minds to look only at the immediate results of things,
without considering their remoter effects. When Tam Telford, stonemason
of Langholm, began at twenty-two years of age to pen poetical epistles
to Robert Burns, most of his fellow-workmen doubtless thought he was
giving himself up to very foolish and nonsensical practices; but he was
really helping to educate Thomas Telford, engineer of the Holyhead Road
and the Caledonian Canal, for all his future usefulness and greatness.

As soon as Tam was out of his indentures, he began work as a journeyman
mason at Langholm on his own account, at the not very magnificent wages
of eighteenpence a day. That isn't much; but at any rate it is an
independence. Besides building many houses in his own town, Tam made
here his first small beginning in the matter of roads and highways, by
helping to build a bridge over the Esk at Langholm. He was very proud of
his part in this bridge, and to the end of his life he often referred to
it as his first serious engineering work. Many of the stones still bear
his private mark, hewn with the tool into their solid surface, with
honest workmanship which helps to explain his later success. But the