k in Thomas Godfrey, a glazier, and his family, who
were to pay a considerable part of it to us, and we to board with
them. We had scarce opened our letters and put our press in order,
before George House, an acquaintance of mine, brought a countryman to
us, whom he had met in the street inquiring for a printer. All our
cash was now expended in the variety of particulars we had been
obliged to procure, and this countryman's five shillings, being our
first-fruits, and coming so seasonably, gave me more pleasure than any
crown I have since earned; and the gratitude I felt toward House has
made me often more ready than perhaps I should otherwise have been to
assist young beginners.

There are croakers in every country, always boding its ruin. Such a
one then lived in Philadelphia; a person of note, an elderly man, with
a wise look and a very grave manner of speaking; his name was Samuel
Mickle. This gentleman, a stranger to me, stopt one day at my door,
and asked me if I was the young man who had lately opened a new
printing-house. Being answered in the affirmative, he said he was
sorry for me, because it was an expensive undertaking, and the expense
would be lost; for Philadelphia was a sinking place, the people
already half-bankrupts, or near being so; all appearances to the
contrary, such as new buildings and the rise of rents, being to his
certain knowledge fallacious; for they were, in fact, among the things
that would soon ruin us. And he gave me such a detail of misfortunes
now existing, or that were soon to exist, that he left me half
melancholy. Had I known him before I engaged in this business,
probably I never should have done it. This man continued to live in
this decaying place, and to declaim in the same strain, refusing for
many years to buy a house there, because all was going to
destruction; and at last I had the pleasure of seeing him give five
times as much for one as he might have bought it for when he first
began his croaking.

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding
year, I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of
mutual improvement, which was called the Junto;[54] we met on Friday
evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his
turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals,
Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and
once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on