In the year 1775, the Society for the Encouragement of Arts offered a series of small money premiums for the best engravings on wood. These prizes were won by Thomas Hodgson, William Coleman, both then living in London, and Thomas Bewick, of Newcastle, who sent up for competition five engravings intended to illustrate a new edition of 'Gay's Fables.' It is of the last of these three--who received an award of seven guineas, which he immediately gave over to his mother--that we have now to write. He was born at Cherryburn, a farmhouse on the south bank of the Tyne, in the parish of Ovingham, about twelve miles from Newcastle, in August 1753. This we learn from an inscription now over the door of the 'byre,' or cowshed, which is still standing. His father was a farmer, who also rented a small coal-pit at Mickley, close by. After having received a fair education at local schools and at Ovingham parsonage, young Thomas, who had shown a great love of drawing, was in October 1767 apprenticed to Ralph Beilby, a general engraver, in St. Nicholas' Churchyard, Newcastle. Here the boy learned to cut diagrams in wood, engrave copper-plates for books, tradesmen's cards, etch ornament on sword-blades, and other work of the kind, much as Hogarth had done some fifty years before him; and, as luck would have it, his master received an {109} order to engrave a series of wood-blocks to illustrate a 'Treatise on Mensuration' written by Mr. Charles Hutton, a schoolmaster in Newcastle--afterwards Dr. Hutton, a Fellow of the Royal Society. This work was issued in fifty sixpenny numbers, and published in a quarto volume in 1770. It was on this book that Thomas Bewick trained his 'prentice hand in the art in which he was afterwards to become so famous. At the end of his apprenticeship in 1774, he worked with his old master for a short time at a guinea a week; then he went to live for a time at Cherryburn, and in 1776, with three guineas sewed in his waist-band, he walked to Edinburgh, Glasgow, and northwards to the Highlands, always staying at farm-houses on the road. He returned to Newcastle in a Leith sloop, and, after working till he had earned sufficient money, took a berth in a collier for London, where he arrived in October and soon found several Newcastle friends. But London life did not suit this child of the country-side. 'I would rather be herding sheep on Mickley bank top,' he writes to a friend, 'than remain in London, although for so doing I was to be made Premier of England.'