The people were carried away with excitement! The great steam-horse that we look at half a dozen times a day with indifference was thought to be the world's greatest wonder. And George Stephenson was the hero of the hour. As the train neared Manchester, the people in their excitement broke all bounds, and even the military could not keep order, as they swarmed on the carriage like bees, and hung on to the handles, many of them being tumbled off, while shoutings and cheers went up from a thousand throats. And now that he was successful, now that people praised where they had blamed, and pandered where they had scoffed, the man remained the same--modest, single-minded, just what he had been as the boy earning his shilling a day by driving the old "gin" horse at the pit's mouth. And now from the humble labourer's cottage he had climbed to the highest heights of fame. He was the first mechanical genius in the eyes of the world. The greatest in the land rejoiced to honour him. From the depths of poverty he had risen to wealth. Honours flowed in upon him. But the "boy is father to the man," and it was peculiarly true of George Stephenson. "I never want," he had said long years before, when he was earning £100 a year, and was able to keep a horse, "I never want to be higher." He was much the same as in those old days. There was no dazzling him with worldly display or worldly honours. He cared little for social distinctions. His instincts all along had been "to dwell among his own people." It gave him the keenest pleasure to have a day at Newcastle among the scenes of his boyhood, looking up the simple friends of his youth. And his tastes, too, remained in many ways just the old simple ones. When he was an old man, and nearing the end of his pilgrimage, when he was surrounded by every luxury of table and otherwise, he would call for a "crowdie," and with the basin of boiling water between his knees, would stir in the oatmeal with his own hands, watching it with great satisfaction, and then sup the whole with sweet milk, pronouncing it "capital." His last days were very peaceful. He removed from the swirling current of business life into a side eddy, when he was about sixty, to a place called Tapton, where he lived a quiet life, meditating among his beasts and birds and flowers, reading in each something of the beauty of the mind of a Greater Inventor than he. He took no part in business life, leaving it to his son, though now and then he would hear from afar echoes from the old world as the old war-horse scents the smoke of battle.