“But where did you get it?” she asked, astonished.
“By holding gentlemen’s horses,” was the reply.
The child’s first situation at this time was with a woman who kept a farm and needed a boy to herd her cows and keep them out of the way of passing waggons. For this the little herd-boy was paid 2d. a day. How happy he was in long leisure hours to bird’s-nest or whittle whistles out of reeds, or in company with another boy—by-and-by, like himself, to be one of the world’s great engineers—to model toy engines out of clay, using hollowed corks for corves and hemlock stalks for steam pipes!
Soon George advanced a step in life. His work was still farm-work—hoeing turnips for 4d. a day, leading the plough horses when his little legs could hardly stride the furrows, and working in the dawning hours of day when other children slept.
But his heart was really at the engine fire or in the coal shaft. It was “bred in the bone,” and he gladly returned to the black, grimy life, and along with his brother became a coal-picker, separating stones and dross from the coal, and so earning 6d. a day.
By-and-by he was advanced to driving “the gin-horse,” a horse that travels round and round at the pit’s mouth drawing up and letting down by means of a rope wound round a drum, baskets of coal or buckets of water, and for this he was paid 8d. a day.
Long miles he had to walk every day to and from his work, “a grit-growing lad, with bare legs and feet,” and I think we may be sure there was not a bird’s nest on that familiar road that the little bird-lover did not know by heart.
His next rise was to a shilling a day. This was a great step up, and for this he had what was called a night shift, lading and unlading the coals as they came to the mouth of the pit, and reversing the rope to go down again. Monotonous enough work it was, but he held on to it for two years. And now another step up was at hand. It was a proud day for the boy—that Saturday afternoon when he was told that his wage had been raised to 12s. a week!
“I am a made man now,” he exclaimed in great delight.
And now he was seventeen years old. He had really stepped beyond his father both in wage and position. But there was one thing which he had yet to master. It may seem strange to us, but George could neither read nor write. It began to dawn upon him then that things about which he wanted to know—pumps and engines and the great world of mechanics—could only be learned from between the boards of books that were closed to him. But with George to realise an evil was to try at once to mend it. Inside the boy’s rough working jacket there beat a manly heart, with a great longing to make the most of his opportunities, to let no chance slip of doing his best.