NEARLY a hundred years ago, a stout, freckle-faced, awkward boy of eighteen years, dressed in a ragged waistcoat and short breeches, without stockings or shoes, rapped one evening at the door of an humble cottage in northern England, and asked to see the village schoolmaster. When that person appeared, the boy said very modestly,— “I would like to attend your evening school, sir.” “And what do you wish to study?” asked the teacher roughly. “I want to learn to read and write, sir,” answered the lad. The schoolmaster glanced over the boy’s homely face and rough clothes scornfully, and said, “Very well, you can attend; but a bare-legged laddie like you would better be doing something else than learning his letters.” Then he closed the door in the lad’s face. If that “bare-legged laddie” had said to the schoolmaster, “I mean to become a great inventor, to be the friend of rich and powerful men, to hold conversation with kings, and to write my name among the great ones of the earth,” it is likely he would have called the boy a fool to cherish such wild dreams. Yet this poor, ignorant lad, who did not know the alphabet at eighteen, accomplished all these things before he died. He did it by hard work and because he made up his mind to do the best he could. He kept pegging away. His ignorance was a misfortune and not a fault. His parents were too poor to send him to school. He was the son of the fireman of a pumping-engine in a Northumberland colliery. His birthplace was a hovel with a clay floor, mud walls, and bare rafters. When he was five years old, he began to work for his living by herding cows in the daytime and barring up the gates at night. As he grew older he was set to picking stones from the coal, and after that to driving a horse which drew coal from the pit. He went half-fed and half-clothed, but for “a” that he had a man’s brave soul in his sturdy little body. For several years he was assistant foreman to his father; then he was made fireman himself. Subsequently, at the age of seventeen, he was plugman of a pumping-engine, a post superior to his father’s. But all the time, though ignorant of books, he had been studying his engine. Gradually he acquired so complete a knowledge of his machine that he was able to take it apart and make any ordinary repairs. The “bare-legged laddie” was smarter than he seemed, and this fact the teacher was not long in finding out after he began to teach him. At the end of two years, by attending evening school, he had learned all that the village schoolmaster could teach him. This brought his school life to an end, but he still kept on studying. He bought books on engineering and mechanics, and spent his leisure in learning what they taught and in experimenting. At last he began to think about making better engines than those around him. Meanwhile he had secured the appointment of enginewright at one of the great collieries of northern England, and he gradually applied his plans for an improved locomotive. He was not entirely successful at first, but he was not discouraged. He saw his mistakes and corrected them. Before he was thirty-five years old he had constructed several locomotive steam-engines, and five years afterward he had become known as a successful and energetic engineer, and was called upon to build long and difficult lines of railway. But his locomotives were too slow; he wanted them to run faster. He proposed to build one that would run at the rate of twelve miles an hour. Everybody laughed at him. Some thought that he was going crazy. One gentleman who considered himself very wise, said to him,— “Suppose you invent an engine capable of running nine or ten miles an hour, and suppose while it was running, a cow should stray upon the track, would not that be a very awkward circumstance?” “I should think it might be awkward indeed—for the coo,” he replied in broad Northumberland dialect. Well, he succeeded in making his locomotive, and at a trial which took place near Liverpool it attained the unprecedented speed of fourteen miles an hour. By making certain improvements, this same engine, the Rocket, was made to attain the speed of thirty miles an hour. People laughed no longer, but admired. He was invited as a consulting engineer to foreign countries, and wealth flowed upon him. Philosophers sought his friendship. His king offered him knighthood, but he refused a title, preferring to remain plain George Stephenson.—The Presbyterian.