George’s confidence was well grounded.  It was not the confidence of ignorance, but that of knowledge.  He understood the engine now, and he saw at once the root of the evil.  He picked the engine to pieces, altered it to suit the requirements of the case, and set it to work to pump without delay.  Sure enough, he kept his word; and within the week, the mine was dry, and the men were sent to the bottom.  This was a grand job for George’s future.  The manager, a Mr. Dodds, not only gave him ten pounds at once as a present, in acknowledgment of his practical skill, but also appointed him engine-man of the new pit, another rise in the social scale as well as in the matter of wages.  Dodds kept him in mind for the future, too; and a couple of years later, on a vacancy occurring, he promoted the promising hand to be engine-wright of all the collieries under his management, at a salary of 100 pounds a year.  When a man’s income comes to be reckoned by the year, rather than by the week or month, it is a sign that he is growing into a person of importance.  George had now a horse to ride upon, on his visits of inspection to the various engines; and his work was rather one of mechanical engineering than of mere ordinary labouring handicraft.

The next few years of George Stephenson’s life were mainly taken up in providing for the education of his boy Robert.  He had been a good son, and he was now a good father.  Feeling acutely how much he himself had suffered, and how many years he had been put back, by his own want of a good sound rudimentary education, he determined that Robert should not suffer from a similar cause.  Indeed, George Stephenson’s splendid abilities were kept in the background far too long, owing to his early want of regular instruction.  So the good father worked hard to send his boy to school; not to the village teacher’s only, but to a school for gentlemen’s sons at Newcastle.  By mending clocks and watches in spare moments, and by rigid economy in all unnecessary expenses (especially beer), Stephenson had again gathered together a little hoard, which mounted up this time to a hundred guineas.  A hundred guineas is a fortune and a capital to a working man.  He was therefore rich enough, not only to send little Robert to school, but even to buy him a donkey, on which the boy made the journey every day from Killingworth to Newcastle.  This was in 1815, when George was thirty-four, and Robert twelve.  Perhaps no man who ever climbed so high as George Stephenson, had ever reached so little of the way at so comparatively late an age.  For in spite of his undoubted success, viewed from the point of view of his origin and early prospects, he was as yet after all nothing more than the common engine-wright of the Killingworth collieries—­a long way off as yet from the distinguished father of the railway system.