Biographies of Working Men | Page 3

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
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 young mason was beginning to discover that Eskdale
was hardly a wide enough field for his budding ambition. He could
carve the most careful headstones; he could cut the most ornamental
copings for doors or windows; he could even build a bridge across the
roaring flooded Esk; but he wanted to see a little of the great world, and
learn how men and masons went about their work in the busy centres of
the world's activity. So, like a patriotic Scotchman that he was, he
betook himself straight to Edinburgh, tramping it on foot, of course, for
railways did not yet exist, and coaches were not for the use of such as
young Thomas Telford.
He arrived in the grey old capital of Scotland in the very nick of time.
The Old Town, a