The life of George Stephenson, railway engineer - Lighthouse ...

30 IJFE OF GEOEGE STEPHENSON. [chap. m.
CHAPTER. III.
ENGINEMAN AT NEWBITEN.—SELF-CULTTJEE.
George Stephenson was eighteen years old before he learnt
to read. He was now almost a full-grown workman, earning
his twelve shillings a week, and having the charge of an engine,
which occupied his time to the extent of twelve hours every
day. He had thus very few leisure moments that he could call
his own. But the busiest man will find them if he watch for
them ; and if he? be careful in turning these moments to useful
account, he will prove them to be the very " gold-dust of time,"
as Young has so beautifully described them.
To his poor parents George Stephenson owed a sound consti-
tution and vigorous health. They had also set before him an
example of sobriety, economy, and patient industry—habits
which are in themselves equivalent to principles. For habits
are the most inflexible of all things ; and principles are, in fact,
but the names which we assign to them. If his parents, out of
their small earnings and scanty knowledge, were unable to give
their son any literary culture, at all events they had trained him
well, and furnished him with an excellent substratum of char-
acter. Unquestionably, however, he laboured under a very seri-
ous disadvantage in having to master, a't a comparatively ad-
vanced age, those simple rudiments of elementary instruction,
which all children in a country calling itself civilized ought to
have imparted to them at school. The youth who reaches man-
hood, and enters, by necessity, upon a career of daily toil, with-
out being able to read his native language, does not start on
equal terms with others who have received the benefits of such
instruction. It is true that he who, by his own voluntary and
determined efforts, overcomes the difficulties early thrown in his