be so scandalous and so notorious, that we may do well to send unto the said person our charitable Admonitions? Or are there any contending persons whom we should admonish, to quench their Contentions ?

3. Is there any special Service to the Interests of Religion, which we may conveniently desire our Ministers to take notice of?

4. Is there any thing we may do well to mention unto the justices for the further promoting good Order?

5. Is there any sort of officers among us to such a Degree unmindful of their Duty, that we may do well to mind them of it?

6. Can any further Methods be devised, that Ignorance and Wickedness may be chased from our People in general, and that Household Piety in particular may flourish among them?

7. Does there appear any Instance of Oppression or Fraudulence in the Dealings of any sort of people, that may call for our Essays to get it rectified?

8. Is there any matter to be humbly moved unto the Legislative Power, to be enacted into a Law for public Benefit?

9. Do we know of any Person languishing under sore and sad Affliction; and is there any thing we may do for the Succor of such an afflicted Neighbour?

10. Has any Person any Proposal to make for our own further Advantage and Assistance, that we ourselves may be in a probable and regular Capacity to pursue the Intention before us ?*

Here we see the origin of the Junto, the famous club founded by Franklin in Philadelphia in 1730. These benefit societies, of which Boston contained several, were sure to enlist such a man as Josiah Franklin, and we may be certain that his son Benjamin often attended the meetings, listened to the questions, and waited, breathless, during the due pause between each, for the interesting replies. Such a boy takes note of every thing, forgets nothing, and brings into play, in after-life, the unconscious gatherings of his childhood. The childhood of a thoughtful man never ceases to instruct him.

The "Boston Newsletter," established two years before Franklin's birth, the only newspaper in America till he was thirteen years old, could not have been overlooked by an eager and intelligent boy. It was a coarse, dingy sheet, about as large as a sheet of the fools

* "Life of Cotton Mather," by his son, Samuel Mather; Boston, 1729; p. 56.

cap writing paper now in common use. The European news was sometimes thirteen months in arrears; yet some faint echo of the great events of the time found its way to the ears of our young tallow-chandler. The later victories of Marlborough; the peace of Utrecht; the wild career of Charles XII.; the founding of St. Petersburg; the South Sea Bubble; the death of Queen Anne; the peaceful accession of George I.; the downfall of Lord Bolingbroke; the attempts of the Pretender; the death of Louis XIV.; were among the paragraphed events of Franklin's boyhood. The events which occurred at Boston needed no chronicler for our young friend. The town had grown then to a population of perhaps ten thousand, contained nine or ten churches, had an arrival from Europe about once a week, sent to sea some kind of craft nearly every day, and the Long Wharf was out eight hundred feet into the harbor. No doubt the boy was upon the wharf when Admiral Walker anchored in the bay his great fleet of fifteen men-of-war and fifty transports, with five thousand troops on board, designed for the conquest of Canada, but destined to wreck and miserable failure. Perhaps the boy was bold enough to go down to the shore in April, 1716, and see the hanging of the six pirates who had served under Captain Bellamy. If he did, he heard one of the most terrific. prayers ever uttered by a clergyman in the hearing of a gang of criminals. The hanging of pirates was a frequent event in that age of the world, when the highways of land and sea were infested with robbers. The Pirates' Own Book was in course of transaction when Franklin was a boy. He took it piece-meal, by hand-bill, Newsletter, fireside narrative, and otherwise. It was in one of his early years that three or four Boston sailors, who had been taken by pirates, rose upon their captors, threw the captain into the sea, clove the skulls of mate and boatswain, bound the crew of six men, and took them to Boston, where they were all hanged. The man who clove the skull of the boatswain was John Fillmore, great grandfather of ex-President Millard Fillmore.*

Young Franklin heard, probably, all about the founding in Boston of a spinning school for girls, and of the erection of a building for the purpose. This scheme was one of the results of the arrival of a colony of linen spinners from Londonderry, who brought to Amer

*Drake's "History of Boston," p. 570.

ica the spinning-wheel, the potato, and the ancestors of Horace Greeley. Boston was an entirely English town then. If it had its days of fast and thanksgiving, it kept also the king's birthday and Guy Fawkes' Day, and had two great fairs every year.

Whatever occurred in Boston, we may be sure that this openeyed, inquiring boy knew it, considered it, and remembered it. Sixty-five years after he had ceased to be a boy, he quoted his boyish recollections to illustrate a point in science. "I remember," he wrote in 1786, "there was a general discourse in Boston, when I was a boy, of a complaint from North Carolina against New England rum, that it poisoned their people, giving them the dry bellyache, with a loss of the use of their limbs. The distilleries being examined on the occasion, it was found that several of them used leaden still-heads and worms, and the physicians were of opinion that the mischief was occasioned by that use of lead. The legislature of Massachusetts thereupon passed an act, prohibiting, under severe penalties, the use of such still-heads and worms thereafter."

Let us not omit to add that the boy was brought up religiously. Regular attendance at the Old South Church was required of him, and of all his brothers and sisters. There, he once heard preach, old Increase Mather, the father of Cotton, and heard him, in the course of his sermon, refer to the death "of that wicked old persecutor of God's people, Louis XIV." There, too, he frequently heard Cotton Mather, in the vigor of his powers. Josiah Franklin was too good-humored and intelligent a man to be an ascetic or a bigot. Such genial natures as his are apt to eat the kernel of their chestnut creed, throw the shells away, and leave the fierce and bristling burr upon the ground; i. e., they practice the virtues, and let alone the dogmas, of their religion. The anecdote of Franklin and his father, told by the grandson of Franklin, permits us to infer that Josiah and his children lived on easy terms with one another, and that he did not embitter and cramp their young lives with the exactions and terrors of the ancient Puritanism. The boy, we are told, found the long graces used by his father, before and after meals, very tedious. One day, after the winter's provisions had been salted, "I think, father," said Benjamin, "if you were to say grace over the whole cask, once for all, it would be a vast saving of time."*

"Works of Dr. Franklin," by W. Temple Franklin, i., 447.

Dr. Joseph Sewall was an associate pastor of the Old South Church from Benjamin's seventh year. Dr. Sewall is described as a Calvinist of the straightest sect, very zealous in his calling, but abundant in alms-giving and all other practical generosity. He was a vigorous, healthy, modest man, who declined the proffered Presidency of Harvard College, and preached a sermon in the evening of his eightieth birthday.

Franklin, upon the whole, spent a very happy boyhood, and his heart yearned toward Boston as long as he lived. When he was eighty-two years old, he spoke of it as "that beloved place." He said, in the same letter, that he would dearly like to ramble again over the scene of so many innocent pleasures; and as that could not be, he had a singular pleasure in the company and conversation of its inhabitants. "The Boston manner," he touchingly added, "the turn of phrase, and even tone of voice and accent in pronunciation, all please, and seem to revive and refresh me.'

If Franklin could now revisit the scenes of his boyhood, there is still there one object which he would recognize, besides the beautiful harbor and its emerald isles. The great elm on Boston Common was "the Great Elm" when Benjamin Franklin played under it in boyhood, and drove home, at sunset, his father's cow from the Commons around Beacon Hill.t

CHAPTER V.

APPRENTICED.

BENJAMIN continued to assist his father for two years, notwithstanding his discontent, and his longing for the sea. Toward the end of the second year, John Franklin, an elder brother of Benja min, who had, like himself, been taken to assist his father when he was a boy, married and removed to Rhode Island, where he set up for himself as a soap and candle maker. This event rendered the aid of Benjamin more important to his father than before, and

* "Franklin to John Lathrop," Sparks, x., 848.

"Atlantic Monthly," June, 1868, p. 692.

seemed forever to close the door of his escape from a business which he loathed. The prospect so inflamed the discontent of the boy, that his father, fearing that he would break loose, as Josiah had done, and go to sea, resolved to apprentice him to a more agreeable trade. Father and son now visited together the workshops of carpenters, turners, braziers, and others; the father observing the inclinations of his boy, anxious, chiefly, to fix upon a trade that would keep him from the sea. The lad watched the labor of the workmen with interest; it was ever after, he tells us, a pleasure to him to see a good mechanic handle his tools; and he obtained from these wanderings among the shops a little insight into the leading trades, that was of use to him all his life, particularly when experimenting in natural philosophy.

Uncle Benjamin's son, Samuel, was then established in Boston as a cutler. It was decided, at length, that Benjamin should try this trade, and he went for a few days to the shop of his cousin Samuel, "upon liking." The boy, it appears, was not displeased with the occupation, but his father and his cousin could not agree upon the premium to be paid, and so Benjamin returned to his candle-making. Some readers may need to be informed, that, at that day (as in Europe to this day), apprentices paid a premium to their masters for the privilege of learning a business. The premium required in such trades as cutlery was then about twenty pounds sterling.

James Franklin, that elder brother of Benjamin, who learned the trade of a printer in London, returned to Boston, with types. and a press of his own, when Benjamin was eleven years old. He set up in business, in Boston, as a printer both of paper and of calico. An advertisement of his, in the Boston Gazette for April 25, 1760, reads thus: "The printer hereof, prints linens, callicoes, silks, etc., in good figures, very lively and durable colors, and without the offensive smell which commonly attends the linens printed here." For a year or more he appears to have done little business. He printed a few pamphlets for booksellers, and, possibly, a few linens, silks, and calicoes for the ladies.

When Benjamin and his father went the rounds of the workshops, the trade of printer does not appear to have occurred to either of them. There was a printer in the family already, and the time had not really gone by when one small printing-office was enough for Boston. Brighter prospects, however, opened for