292 TELFORD'S PARENTAGE. PART VIII. 



by a native of the valley. " If they remained at home," 

 said he, " we should all be sunk in poverty, scrambling 

 with each other amongst these hills for a bare living. 

 But our peasantry have a spirit above that : they will 

 not consent to sink ; they look up ; and our parish schools 

 give them a power of making their way in the world, 

 each man for himself. So they swarm off some to 

 America, some to Australia, some to India, and some, 

 like Telford, work their way across the border and up 

 to London, though he is the only one from this valley 

 who has yet reached Westminster Abbey." 



One would scarcely have expected to find the birth- 

 place of the builder of the Menai Bridge and other great 

 national works in so obscure a corner of the kingdom. 

 Possibly it may already have struck the reader with 

 surprise, that not only were all the engineers described in 

 the preceding pages self-taught in their professions, but 

 they were brought up mostly in remote country places, 

 far from the active life of great towns and cities. But 

 genius is of no locality, and springs alike from the farm- 

 house, the peasant's hut, or the herd's shieling. Strange 

 indeed it is that the men who have built our bridges, 

 docks, lighthouses, canals, and railways, should nearly 

 all have been country-bred boys : Edwards and Brindley 

 the sons of small farmers ; Smeaton, brought up in his 

 father's country house at Austhorpe ; Rennie, the son of 

 a farmer and freeholder ; ^nd Stephenson, brought up in a 

 village, an engine-tenter's son. But Telford, even more 

 than any of these, was a purely country-bred boy, and 

 was born and brought up in a valley so secluded that it 

 could not even boast of a cluster of houses of the dimen- 

 sions of a village. 



Telford' s father was a herd on the sheep-farm of 

 Grlendinning. The farm consists of green hills, lying 

 along the valley of the Meggat, a little burn, which 

 descends from the moorlands on the east, and falls into 



