A New Story Book for Children

by Fanny Fern

THE INVENTOR OF THE LOCOMOTIVE.

Did you ever ride in an old-fashioned stage coach? cramped in your back, cramped in your legs, with a “crick” in your neck, while you were packed in, and strapped in so closely that it was next to impossible to move a toe or a finger? Was the day hot and dusty, and had the tired horses hill after hill to crawl and climb up? Was some fellow-passenger’s knee boring a hole in your back, and did you bump, and thump, and bob about, hour after hour, unable to sleep, and too weary almost to live, till, when you drew up at last to some little country tavern, before which Lafayette or Washington hung creaking on a sign, with John Smith’s Hotel underneath, you didn’t care whether you ever got out or not; whether you ever ate, or drank, or laughed again; whether your trunk was safe, or lost on the road, miles back? Well, if you have not experienced all this, perhaps your father or mother, or uncle, or aunt have; and they will tell you that is one of the slow methods in which people used to travel before railroads and cars were invented. Ah, but, you say, stages were safer than railroad cars! Were they? They never tipped over, I suppose, or rolled over a precipice of a dark night, or had defective wheels, or drunken drivers, or balky horses, or any thing of that sort. And if anybody was very sick, or dying, at a distance, they might not have been buried weeks, I suppose, before one could reach them.

Well, people after a while thought they might travel faster than this, and quite as safely, too.

George Stephenson, the great Railway Engineer, was one of the first who thought this, and worked hard, and long, to make it possible. I want to tell you about him, because it seems to me quite beautiful that a poor, uneducated boy, as he was, should have brought so great a thing to pass. I rejoice in it, because I love to think that in our country our most useful and best men have, many of them, been very poor and humble when young; and because I want every boy who reads this to feel encouraged to try what he too can do, instead of folding his hands and saying, “oh, what’s the use? I was born poor, and I shall die poor; I’m ignorant, and I shall die ignorant. Who cares what becomes of me?” I tell you I care for one, and if nobody cared, you ought to care yourself. It is very certain, if you don’t care yourself, that nobody can do much for you. Well, George Stephenson was the son of a poor collier, in England. He was the second of six children, for whom their father and mother worked hard to find bread and butter. Little George lived like other working people’s children: played about the doors, went bird’s nesting now and then, or of errands to the village; and as he grew bigger, carried his father’s dinner to him when at work; or helped nurse his brothers and sisters at home; for in a poor man’s house, you know, every little hand and foot must do something in the way of helping. As to school, none of them thought of such a thing; it was as much as they could do to keep a roof over their heads, and something to eat and drink. Dewley Burn was the name of the place where the one-roomed cottage stood, in which George was born; and near which his father was employed, to tend the engine-fire near the coalpit. Robert Stephenson, George’s father, was a kind-hearted, pleasant man. You may know that, because all the young people of an evening used to go and sit round his engine-fire while he told stories to them; sometimes about Sinbad the Sailor; sometimes about Robinson Crusoe, and often something which he himself “made up” to please them. Of course “Bob’s engine-fire” was a great place. No stoop of a village tavern on “muster day” was ever more glorious to happy urchins. You can almost see the picture; the bright fire blazing, and rows of bright eyes glistening in its light, some black, some blue, some gray; curly locks and straight locks, slender lads, and fat lads; some with chins on their palms, and elbows on their knees, some flat on their backs or sides, on the ground; and all believing every word of Bob’s, as you now do storybooks, which they would have given their ears to get hold of, though I have my doubts, if they are better, after all, than were “Bob’s stories.” Now you are not to think because George’s father worked as a collier, that he had no love for beautiful things. On the contrary, he used to take nice long, breezy summer walks, whenever he got a chance, with his little son. And when George had grown up to be a man, and long after his good father’s white head was under the sod, George used to speak often of his lifting him up to look into a black-bird’s nest, and of the delight and wonder with which he gazed at the little peeping creatures for the first time. I dare say your father and mother can tell you some such little thing which they remember about their childhood’s home, which stands out in their memory now, from the mist of years, like a lovely picture, sunny and glowing and untouched by time.

These are blessed memories to keep the heart green. They are like the little swaying wild flower that the dusty traveler sometimes finds in a rock crevice, breathing out its sweetness all the same as if it were not hemmed in by flinty walls and bars; more beautiful than the most gorgeous garden flowers, which every passer by has gazed at, and handled, because to God and ourselves it is sacred. These childish memories! they are the first round of the ladder by which our world-weary feet shall climb to heaven, after those who have rocked our cradles.

Near Dewley Burn lived a widow, named Grace Ainslie, who kept a number of cows that used to nibble the grass along the woods. A boy was needed to watch them, and keep them from being run over by the coal wagons, or straying into the neighboring fields. To this boy’s duty was added that of barring the gates at night, after the coal wagons had passed through. George applied for this place, and to his great joy he got it, at two pence a day. It was easy work to loll about on the fresh green grass, and watch the lazy cows as they nibbled, or stretched themselves under the trees, chewing and winking, hour after hour. George had plenty of time to look for birds’ nests and make whistles out of sticks and straws, and build little mills in the water streams. But if you watched the boy, you would see that, best of all, when he and his friend Tom got together, he liked to build clay engines. The clay they found in the bogs, and of the hemlock which grew about, they made their steam pipes. I dare say some solemn wise head might have passed that way, and sighed that these boys were “wasting their time” playing in the mud; not remembering that children in their “foolish play,” by their little failures and successes in experimenting, sometimes educate themselves better than any book-read man in the land could do it; at least, at that age. Then it was a blessed thing that the child’s work lay out of doors, and not in a stifling close factory, or shop. That his limbs got strong and his cheek brown and sunburnt, and his eye bright as a young eagle’s. Every day now added to his growth, and of course to his employment; though scarcely big enough to stride, he led the horses when plowing, and when he was able to hoe turnips and do such farm work, he was very much delighted at his increased wages of fourpence a day. When he was thirteen, he made a sun-dial for his father’s cottage. You may be sure his father was very proud of that. His little head had been busy, you see, when he lay on the grass watching the cows. By and by George got eighteen pence a day, and at last the wish of his heart, in being taken as an assistant to his father in feeding the engine fire. George was very much afraid, he was such a little fellow, that he should be thought too young for the work, and when the overseer of the colliery went the rounds, to see if everything was done right, George used to hide himself, for fear he would think him too small a boy to earn his wages. Some lads as fond as he was of bird’s-nesting, and such amusements, would not have been in such a hurry to make themselves useful; but George’s parents worked hard, and he loved them; he knew that white hairs were creeping among those brown locks of his mother’s, and that his good, merry father would not always be able to tend the engine fire; and so though his tame black-bird, who made the cottage her home in winter, flying in and out, and roosting on the head of his bed, and disappearing in the spring and summer, in the woods, to pair and to rear its young, and then coming back again in winter to live with George; although his bird was a very pretty pet, and his tame rabbits were a great pleasure, too, yet little as he was, he was anxious to shoulder his share of the burden that was pressing so heavily on his parents. Ever since, too, that he had modeled that little clay engine in the bog, he had determined to be an engineer, and the first step to this was to be an assistant fireman. Imagine, then, his delight when, at fourteen years, he got the post at the wages of a shilling a day.

George’s home was one small room, crowded with three low-posted beds, in which father and mother, four sons, and two daughters slept. This one room was, of course, parlor, kitchen and sleeping-room, all in one. This cottage was furnished by the Duke who employed these people; he being also their landlord. Now I would be willing if I ever made bets, to bet you something handsome, that this Duke had a liveried servant behind his chair at home, and a table loaded with dainties, and silver and cut glass, and more wines in his castle than he knew how to use; and horses and hounds, and carriages and pictures, and statues, and conservatories and hot houses, and all that; and yet, that he was not one half as happy as the Stephensons in that little cottage with one room. Aching heads are apt to go with dainty food, and weak limbs with soft beds. When a poor man has a friend, he generally knows that he is loved for himself; when a rich man has one, he is never sure how much his riches have to do with his friendship. Many a rich man has sighed for the days when he used to run barefoot; and many a jeweled lady for the day when the little brook was her looking-glass. Things are more equal in this life, after all, than grumblers are apt to imagine. Well, to go back to George, all the time he was feeding that fire, he had his eyes open, watching everything about the engine; nothing escaped his notice; I have no doubt his father watched him, with an honest pride shining out of his eyes. It must have been very pleasant for the two to work together, and help each other; for George was growing strong and big, and used to try to make himself stronger by lifting heavy weights. When he was seventeen, he was made a “flagman.” That was a station as watchman above his father, as the flagman holds a higher rank than the fireman, and receives higher wages. No doubt good old Robert was as delighted as George could be at this promotion. We can imagine, too, how his mother and sisters, as they worked industriously to keep the little one room cottage tidy and comfortable, sang cheerfully as they worked, when they thought of their good strong brother. It is a flagman’s duty, when the engine is out of order, to call on the chief engineer to set it right. George had rarely need to do this. The engine was a perfect pet with him. He understood every part of it; he took it to pieces and cleaned it himself, and learned so well how it worked, and what it needed, that nobody could instruct him anything about it. It is said that all the important improvements of steam-engines have been made, not by learned literary men, but by plain laborers.

Everything that George undertook, howsoever small the matter might be, he determined to understand perfectly, and to do well and thoroughly. When George said that he knew he could do a thing, all his friends knew it was no idle boast. So you will not be astonished when I tell you that he went on studying and improving till he became a famous man; so famous that he received calls from abroad, asking his advice as “a constructing engineer” about building bridges and railways, and all such things. I guess he never thought of that, when he was building bridges of mud with his play-fellows. Little children, you see, are not always “wasting their time” when they are playing quietly by themselves. No, indeed. I guess he didn’t think then that he should build a two-mile bridge across the St. Lawrence in connection with the Grand Trunk Canadian Railway, which should be so much admired and praised for its taste as well as skill; or, when he slept in the little cottage with only one room in it, that he should one day become “a Member of Parliament;” or that when he died, he should be buried in state at Westminster Abbey, where all the famous, great men were buried, and that immense crowds of people should go to his funeral, and be so sorry that a man who was so useful to his country should die, when he was only fifty-six years old. But so it was. I think George made good use of those fifty-six years; don’t you?