llustrious career--what was the effect produced
by reading these two little books of Defoe and Cotton Mather? "they
perhaps gave me a turn of thinking, which had an influence on some of
the principal future events of my life." Yes, sir, in the reading of
those books was the acorn that sprouted into that magnificent oak; there
was the fountain-drop which a fairy might have sipped from a buttercup,
from which has flowed the Missouri and the Mississippi,--the broad, deep
river of Franklin's fame, winding its way through the lapse of ages, and
destined to flow on, till it shall be ingulfed in the ocean of eternity.

From his "infancy," sir, "passionately fond of reading," nay, with the
appetite of a vulture, with the digestion of an ostrich, attacking the
great folios of polemic divinity in his father's library. Not a dull
boy, either; not a precocious little bookworm; fond of play; doesn't
dislike a little mischief; sometimes, as he tells us, "led the other
boys into scrapes;" but in his intervals of play, in his leisure
moments, up in the lonely garret when the rest of the family were
asleep, holding converse in his childhood with the grave old
non-conformists, Howe and Owen and Flavel and Baxter,--communing with
the austerest lords of thought; the demigods of puritanism.

Franklin not a book-man? Why, he goes on to tell us that it was "this
bookish inclination which at length determined his father to make him a
printer," against his own inclination, which was for the sea; and when
he had thus by constraint become a printer, his great consolation was,
as he says, that "I now had access to better books. An acquaintance with
the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes to borrow a small
one, which I was careful to return soon and clean. Often I sat up in my
chamber reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was
borrowed in the evening and was to be returned in the morning, lest it
should be found missing."

Then he made the acquaintance of Mr. Matthew Adams, an ingenious,
sensible man, "who had a pretty collection of books." He frequented the
printing-office, took notice of the bright little apprentice, and "very
kindly proposed to lend me such books as I chose to read." Having taken
to a vegetable diet at the age of sixteen, he persuaded his brother to
allow him in cash half the price of his board,--lived upon potatoes and
hasty pudding,--soon found that he could save half even of that little
allowance