of water. This achievement brought him fame as a pumpcurer. Dods made him a present of ten pounds, and he was appointed engine-man on good wages at the pit he had redeemed, until the work of sinking was completed. The job lasted about a year. Thus, at the age of thirty, Stephenson had begun to find his way across the borders of the engineer's profession. To all the wheezy engines in the neighbourhood he was called in as a professional adviser. The regular men called him a quack; but the quack perfectly understood the constitution of an engine, and worked miracles of healing... One day, as he passed a drowned quarry, on his way from work, at which a windmill worked an inefficient pump, he told the men "he would set up for them an engine no bigger than a kail-pot, that would clear them out in a week." And he fulfilled his promise. A year after his triumph at the Killingworth Pit, George Stephenson was appointed engine-wright to the colliery at a salary of one hundred pounds a-year. As engine-wright, Stephenson had opportunities of carrying still farther his study of the engine, as well as of turning to account the knowledge he already possessed. His ingenuity soon caused a reduction of the number of horses employed in the colliery from a hundred to fifteen or sixteen; and he had access not only to the mine at Killingworth, but to all the collieries belonging to Lord Ravensworth and his partners, a firm that had been named the Grand Allies. The locomotive engine was then known to the world as a new toy, curious and costly. Stephenson had a perception of what might be done with it, and was beginning to make it the subject of his thoughts. George Stephenson was thirty-two years old, and however little he may by that time have achieved, one sees that he had accumulated in himself a store of power that would inevitably carry him on, upon his own plan of inch by inch advance, to new successes. Various experiments had been made with the new locomotive engines. One had been tried upon the Wylam tram-road, which went past the cottage in which Stephenson was born... George Stephenson brooded upon the subject, watched their failures, worked at the theory of their construction, and made it his business to see one. He felt his way to the manufacture of a better engine, and proceeded to bring the subject under the notice of the lessees of the colliery. He had acquired reputation not only as an ingenious but as a safe and prudent man. He had instituted already many improvements in the collieries... Lord Ravensworth, the principal partner, therefore authorised him to fulfil his wish; and with the greatest difficulty, making workmen of some of the colliery hands and having the colliery blacksmith for his head assistant, he built his first locomotive in the workshops at Westmoor, and called it "My Lord"... It was the first engine constructed with smooth wheels; for Stephenson never admitted the prevailing notion that contrivances were necessary to secure adhesion. "My Lord" was called "Blutcher" by the people round about. It was first placed on the Killingworth Railway on the 25th of July, 1814, and, though a cumbrous machine, was the most successful that had, up to that date, been constructed. At the end of a year it was found that the work done by Blutcher cost about as much as the same work would have cost if done by horses. Then it occurred to Stephenson to turn the steam-pipe into the chimney, and carry the smoke up with the draught of a steam-blast. That would add to the intensity of the fire and to the rapidity with which steam could be generated. The power of the engine was, by this expedient, doubled. At about the same time some frightful accidents, caused by explosion in the pits of his district, set Stephenson to exercise his ingenuity for the discovery of a miner's safety lamp. By a mechanical theory of his own, tested by experiments made boldly at the peril of his life, he arrived at the construction of a lamp less simple, though perhaps safer, than that of Sir Humphry Davy, and with the same method of defence... The practical man and the philosopher worked independently in the same year on the same problem. Stephenson's solution was arrived at a few weeks earlier than Davy's, and upon this fact a great controversy afterwards was founded... One material result of it was, that Stephenson eventually received as a public testimonial a thousand pounds, which he used later in life as capital for the founding at Newcastle of his famous locomotive factory. At the Killingworth pits the "Geordy" safety lamp is still in use, being there, of course, considered to be better than the Davy. Locomotives had been used only on the tram-roads of the collieries, and by the time when Stephenson built his second engine were generally abandoned as failures. Stephenson alone stayed in the field and did not care who said that there would be at Killingworth "a terrible blow-up some day." ... He had already made up his mind that the perfection of a travelling engine would be half lost if it did not run on a perfected rail. Engine and rail he spoke of, even then, as 66 man and wife," and his contrivances for the improvement of the locomotive always went hand in hand with his contrivances for the improvement of the road on which it ran... We need not follow the mechanical details. In his work at the rail and engine he made progress in his own way, inch by inch; every new locomotive built by him contained improvements on its predecessor; every time he laid down a fresh rail he added some new element of strength and firmness to it. The Killingworth Colliery Railway was the seed from which sprang the whole system of railway intercourse. survey. The Darlington line was constructed in accordance with his His travelling engine ran upon it for the first time on the 27th of September, 1825, in sight of an immense concourse of people, and attained, in some parts of its course, a speed, then unexampled, of twelve miles an hour. With what determined perseverance Mr. Stephenson upheld the cause of the locomotive in connection with the proposed Liverpool and Manchester line: how he did cheaply what all the regular engineers declared impossible or ruinous, in carrying that line over Chat-Moss, persevering, when all who were about him had confessed despair, and because he had made good his boldest promises in every one case: how he was at last trusted in the face of public ridicule, upon the merits of the locomotive also: how after the line was built, at the public competition of light engines constructed in accordance with certain strict conditions, his little Rocket won the prize: how the fulfilment of his utmost assertions raised Stephenson to the position of an oracle in the eyes of the public: how he nevertheless went on improving the construction of both rails and locomotives: how the great railway system, of which the foundations were laid patiently by him, was rapidly developed : how, when success begot a mania, he was as conspicuous for his determined moderation as he had before been for his determined zeal how he attained honor and fortune; and retired from public life, again to grow enormous fruits or vegetables in his garden, pineapples instead of leeks, again to pet animals and watch the birds' nests in the hedges we need not detail. One of the chief pleasures of his latter days was to hold out a helping hand to poor inventors who deserved assistance. He was a true man to the last, whom failure never drove to despair; whom success never elated to folly. Inch by inch he made his ground good in the world and for the world... A year before his death in 1848, somebody, about to dedicate a book to him, asked him what were his "ornamental initials." His reply was, "I have to state that I have no flourishes to my name, either before or after; and I think it will be as well if you merely say, George Stephenson." Household Words. Besides the judgment, invention, and other mental capacities of which his thorough workmanship proved his possession, the characteristic for which we were the least prepared was his element of speculativeness, approaching almost to imaginative power. There were times when his eye kindled, his frame dilated under the influence of some conception which he had been working out abstractedly, and when in homely, but luminous phrase, he became actually eloquent. At such moments the discerning auditor was conscious that he was in the presence of one of Nature's great ones, and saw the manifestation of an inner genius that was ordinarily hidden from observers. ... 66 An incident of his Drayton visit is in this sense very remarkable:-One day the party were standing together on the terrace near the hall, and observed in the distance a railway train flashing along, throwing behind it a long line of white steam. "Now, Buckland," said Stephenson," I have a poser for you. Can you tell me what is the power which is driving that train ?' Well," said the Doctor, "I suppose it is one of your big engines." "But what drives the engine?" "Oh, very likely a canny Newcastle driver.” "What do you say to the light of the sun?" "How can that be?" asked the Doctor... "It is nothing else," said the engineer; "it is light bottled up in the earth for tens of thousands of years; light, absorbed by plants and vegetables, being necessary for the condensation of carbon, during the process of their growth, if it be not carbon in another form; and now, after being buried in the earth for long ages in fields of coal, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated, and made to work, as in that locomotive, for great human purposes.' George Stephenson, man and boy, pitman and prince of the powers of his century, the hero of as great a revolution as this or any age has witnessed, was morally an unpretending character, with a curious interest in Nature and her ways. But he lived to cast a mighty net, and his signet mark on the earth's surface has been ruled in lines of iron. He is the patriarch of the iron age, with its levelling principles, its expansive forces, and its accelerated progress... Not till the present century has closed will it be easy to judge the changes he has wrought on our habits and inclinations by his single invention. Class cannot participate with class in the power of ranging to and fro, nation cannot visit nation, the ends of the earth cannot be brought together, without consequences of which we know, thus far, only the commencement... When gunpowder brought equality into the battle field, and the printing press discussion into the Church and the assembly, we know that something further followed; the course of modern history was altered, and the pulses of public life began to flow. And now we are getting equality of material resources, equality in our dealings with time and space. Will nothing come of this hereafter? Of the rail and wheelStephenson's "man and wife”—may not our sons and our sons' sons look for the progeny? Times. HUGH MILLER; THE BOYHOOD OF A GEOLOGIST. I HAD a very pleasant playmate who, though he was my junior by about a twelvemonth, and shorter by about half a head, was a diligent boy in even the Grammar School, in which boys were so rarely diligent, and, for his years, a thoroughly sensible one, without a grain of the dreamer in his composition. I succeeded, however, notwithstanding his sobriety, in infecting him thoroughly with my peculiar tastes, and learned to love him very much, partly because he doubled my amusements by sharing in them, and partly, I daresay - on the principle on which Mahomet preferred his old wife to his young one "he believed in me." Devoted to him as Caliban in the Tempest to his friend Trinculo because "I showed him the best springs, I plucked him berries, His curiosity on one occasion was largely excited by my description of the Doocot Cave; and, setting out one morning to explore its wonders, armed with John Feddes's hammer, in the benefits of which my friend was permitted liberally to share, we failed, for that day at least, in finding our way back. It was on a pleasant spring morning that, with my little curious friend beside me, I stood on the beach opposite the eastern promontory, that, with its stern granitic wall, bars access for ten days out of every fourteen to the wonders of the Doocot; and saw it stretching provokingly out into the green water. It was hard to be disappointed, and the cave so near. tide was a low neap, and if we wanted a passage dry-shod, it behoved us to wait for at least a week; but neither of us understood the philosophy of neap-tides at the period ... A narrow and broken shelf runs along the promontory, on which, by the The |