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.  Probably the provocation was severe, for in after-life Telford always showed himself duly respectful to constituted authority; and we know that petty self-made master-workmen are often apt to be excessively severe to their own hired helpers, and especially to helpless lads or young apprentices.  At any rate, Tam wouldn’t go back; and in the end, a well-to-do cousin, who had risen to the proud position of steward at the great hall of the parish, succeeded in getting another mason at Langholm, the little capital of Eskdale, to take over the runaway for the remainder of the term of his indentures.