...
After her husband's death, the poor widow removed from her old
cottage to a still more tiny hut, which she shared with a
neighbour—a very small hut, with a single door for both families;
and here young Tam Telford spent most of his boyhood in the quiet
honourable poverty of the uncomplaining rural poor. As soon as he
was big enough to herd sheep, he was turned out upon the hillside
in summer like any other ragged country laddie, and in winter he
tended cows, receiving for wages only his food and money enough to
cover the cost of his scanty clothing. He went to school, too;
how, nobody now knows: but he DID go, to the parish school of
Westerkirk, and there he learnt with a will, in the winter months,
though he had to spend the summer on the more profitable task of
working in the fields. To a steady earnest boy like young Tam
Telford, however, it makes all the difference in the world that he
should have been to school, no matter how simply. Those twenty-six
letters of the alphabet, once fairly learnt, are the key, after
all, to all the book-learning in the whole world. Without them,
the shepherd-boy might remain an ignorant, unprogressive shepherd
all his life long, even his undeniable native energy using itself
up on nothing better than a wattled hurdle or a thatched roof; with
them, the path is open before him which led Tam Telford at last to
the Menai Bridge And Westminster Abbey.
When Tam had gradually eaten his way through enough thin oatmeal
porridge (with very little milk, we fear) to make him into a hearty
lad of fifteen, it began to be high time for him to choose himself
a final profession in life, such as he was able. And here already
the born tastes of the boy began to show themselves: for he had no
liking for the homely shepherd's trade; he felt a natural desire
for a chisel and a hammer—the engineer was there already in the
grain—and he was accordingly apprenticed to a stonemason in the
little town of Lochmaben, beyond the purple hills to eastward. But
his master was a hard man; he had small mercy for the raw lad; and
after trying to manage with him for a few months, Tam gave it up,
took the law into his own hands, and ran away...
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