486 HIS SELF-CULTURE. PART VIII. 



having stolen upon him, he felt the strain almost more 

 than he could bear. But that great anxiety over, his 

 spirits speedily resumed their wonted elasticity. 



When engaged upon the construction of the Carlisle 

 and Glasgow road, he was very fond of getting a few of 

 the " navvy men," as he called them, to join him at an 

 ordinary at the Hamilton Arms Hotel, Lanarkshire, each 

 paying his own expenses ; and though Telford told them 

 he could not drink, yet he would carve and draw corks 

 for them. One of the rules he laid down was, that no 

 business was to be introduced from the moment they sat 

 down to dinner. All at once, from being the plodding, 

 hard-working engineer, with responsibility and thought 

 in every feature, Telford unbended and relaxed, and 

 became the merriest and drollest of the party. He pos- 

 sessed a great fund of anecdote available for such occa- 

 sions, had an extraordinary memory for facts relating to 

 persons and families, and the wonder to many of his 

 auditors was, how in all the world a man living in London 

 should know so much better about their locality and 

 many of its oddities than they did themselves. 



In his leisure hours at home, which were but few, he 

 occupied himself a good deal in the perusal of miscel- 

 laneous literature, never losing his taste for poetry. 

 He continued to indulge in the occasional composition 

 of verses until a comparatively late period of his life ; 

 one of his most successful efforts being a translation of 

 the ' Ode to May,' from Buchanan's Latin poems, exe- 

 cuted in a very tender and graceful manner. That he 

 might be enabled to peruse engineering works in French 

 and German, he prosecuted the study of those languages, 

 and with such success that he was shortly able to read 

 them with comparative ease. He occasionally occupied 

 himself in literary composition on subjects connected 

 with his profession. Thus he wrote for the Edinburgh 

 Encyclopedia, conducted by his friend Sir David (then 

 Dr.) Brewster, the elaborate and able articles on Archi- 



