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It is easy to write such things, not so easy to verify them, but any one that has seen the sleuthlike eyes of men accustomed to dealing with danger in the shape of wild beasts or treacherous tribes or still more treacherous companions, and whose lives depend upon their feeling for peril and their unerring vigilance can see what George Hagar saw in Mark Telford's looks.
This he promptly proceeded to do, and the result was, that an extensive hypocaust apartment was brought to light, with baths, sudatorium, dressing-room, and a number of tile pillars all forming parts of a Roman floor sufficiently perfect to show the manner in which the building had been constructed and used.* Among Telford's less agreeable duties about the same time was that of keeping the felons at work.
In the town are three arched door-heads of a more ornamental character than the rest, of Telford's hewing; for he was already beginning to set up his pretensions as a craftsman, and took pride in pointing to the superior handiwork which proceeded from his chisel.
The first bridge designed and built under Telford's superintendence was one of no great magnitude, across the river Severn at Montford, about four miles west of Shrewsbury. It was a stone bridge of three elliptical arches, one of 58 feet and two of 55 feet span each. The Severn at that point is deep and narrow, and its bed and banks are of alluvial earth.
Hagar saw a smile play ironically on Telford's face saw it followed by a steellike fierceness in the eye. He replied to both in like fashion, but one would have said the advantage was with Telford he had the more remarkable personality. The two were left alone. They passed through the cloisters without a word. Hagar saw the two figures disappear down the long vista of groined arches.
As long as she lived, indeed, he never forgot her; and one of the first tasks he set himself when he was out of his indentures was to cut a neat headstone with a simple but beautiful inscription for the grave of that shepherd father whom he had practically never seen. At Langholm, an old maiden lady, Miss Pasley, interested herself kindly in Janet Telford's rising boy.
And yet, what lad could ever have started in the world under apparently more hopeless circumstances than widow Janet Telford's penniless orphan shepherd-boy Tam, in the bleakest and most remote of all the lonely border valleys of southern Scotland?
At first, Telford's work as county surveyor lay mostly in very small things indeed mere repairs of sidepaths or bridges, which gave him little opportunity to develop his full talents as a born engineer. But in time, being found faithful in small things, his employers, the county magistrates, began to consult him more and more on matters of comparative importance.
This visit to Eskdale was really Telford's last farewell to his old home, before setting out on a journey which was to form the turning- point in his own history, and in the history of British engineering as well. In Scotch phrase, he was going south.
When one thinks how large a number of human beings have been benefited by Telford's Scotch harbour works alone, it is impossible not to envy a great engineer his almost unlimited power of permanent usefulness to unborn thousands of his fellow-creatures. As a canal-maker, Telford was hardly less successful than as a constructor of roads and harbours.
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