untiring industry and mother-wit. His predominant trait was practical common sense amounting to genius. God gave him the sound mind in the sound body, and he did the rest himself. He soon revolted at the vulgar duties of his father's business, and at the age of thirteen was apprenticed till his majority to his elder brother, who was a printer and bookseller, and the publisher of the New England Courant, one of the earliest newspapers in the Colonies.

From this time forward the printing office was his school and his university, and probably did more for him than Oxford or Harvard could then have done. With a raging thirst for knowledge he developed a keen and unfailing observation of things and of men, and, above all, a constant study of himself, of which he was a very rare example. He denied himself every pleasure but reading, and robbed his body of food and sleep that he might find time and food for his mind, reading every good book on which he could lay his hands. He soon mastered the art of printing as it was then known, and very early developed a faculty for the use of his pen which gave his brain a vent. He began with two ballads — “The Lighthouse Tragedy" and "Blackbeard the Pirate " - and hawked them about the town. The first, he says, sold wonderfully, but his father discouraged him by ridiculing his performances, and telling him verse makers were generally beggars, and "So," he says, "I escaped being a poet; most probably a very bad one."

So precocious was his literary faculty that very soon he began contributing leading articles to the Courant, and when he was sixteen, his brother having been placed under an interdict for criticizing the authorities, he became himself the publisher and editor, and of course the circulation increased. But he was still only an apprentice, and his manly and independent spirit found it as hard to brook the indignities and blows to which his master, though he was his brother, subjected him, as he had found it before to ladle the tallow and fill the moulds in his father's shop, and so at seventeen he took to his heels, shook the dust of Boston from his feet, and ran away to Philadelphia.

He landed in the Quaker City with but one dollar in his pocket, and as he had often dined on bread, he bought three rolls, and marched up Market Street, his pockets stuffed with shirts and stockings, eating one roll and with another under each arm. His future wife saw him in this guise as he passed her father's door, and thought he presented a ridiculous appearance, as he certainly did. But he had thoroughly learned his trade, and soon found employment as a journeyman printer. He would have gone on very well had he not been sent to London by the Governor of the Province on a promise of business which totally failed. He found himself in that great city without a friend, and with little money in his pocket. But he soon found employment at good wages in the best printing offices at thirty shil

lings a week, lodged in Little Britain at three and sixpence, and so managed to keep his head above water for eighteen months, but lived an aimless and somewhat irregular life.

However, he worked hard at his trade, and made some ingenious acquaintances, among them Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, and Sir William Wyndham, once Chancellor of the Exchequer - the former by selling him a curiosity which he had brought from America; the latter by his skill in swimming, in which he had from boyhood been a great expert. His own account of this last acquaintance is not a little diverting. He had visited Chelsea with a party of friends, and on the return by water was induced to give them an exhibition of his skill in this manly art. He swam all the way from Chelsea to Blackfriars, performing many feats of agility both upon and under water that surprised and pleased the spectators. Sir William, hearing of this, sent for him, and offered if he would teach his two sons to swim to set him up in that business, and so he might have spent his life in London as the head of a swimming school, and never have lived to snatch the lightning from the clouds or the sceptre from tyrants, or to change the map of the world.

Before leaving London he accepted from a reputable merchant who was returning to Philadelphia an offer of a clerkship, and in a few months, he learned much of the business, but was thrown out of it by the death of his employer, and by a

terrible illness, from which he barely recovered. Referring to this illness he wrote his own epitaph, which, fortunately for the world, there was no occasion to use:

The Body

of

Benjamin Franklin

(Like the cover of an old book,

Its contents torn out

and stripped of its lettering and binding),
Lies here, food for worms.

Yet the work itself shall not be lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more
In a new

And more beautiful Edition,
Corrected and Amended

By

The Author.

Soon after this illness he turned over a new leaf, with firm resolve to train himself for a successful and honorable life by the practice of every virtue. He returned to his old business of printing, which for twenty years he followed with the utmost diligence, and became very prosperous.

About this time he conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection, and rigidly schooled himself in the virtues of temperance, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, moderation, and cleanliness. By constant reading, study, and observation he made the very best of the great mental capacity with which he had been endowed by Nature. He set to work

deliberately and with conscientious fidelity to improve to the best advantage all his faculties, not for his own good and happiness only, but for the benefit of the community to which he belonged. From an odd volume of the Spectator which fell into his hands he modelled his style, training himself more rigorously than any school could have trained him, and thus acquired very early in life that power of clear and lucid expression which made all his subsequent writings so effective.

A brilliant modern writer, Hugh Black, has said that "culture is the conscious training in which a man makes use of every educational means within his reach, feeding his inner life by every vital force in history and experience, and so adjusting himself to his environment that he shall absorb the best products of the life of his time, thus making his personality rich and deep.'

It was this self-culture that Franklin sought to attain, and he never lost sight of his object. Selfcontrol once achieved, enabled him in large measure to control others. No wonder, then, that in Philadelphia, at that time already a large city, he not only rapidly achieved success in his business, but became before long a marked figure in Pennsylvania and throughout the thirteen Colonies. He never wasted time, and so time never wasted him, and at the age of forty-two he was able to withdraw from the active management of his business, and to devote himself to public affairs and to scientific studies in which his soul delighted.