ader, who has his own work to do,
care for a great multitude of details which are not needed for the
setting of the picture? _To the point_ is the cry of our busy life.

Benjamin Franklin is here introduced to the reader

AT FIFTY-TWO.

What had he done at that age to command more than ordinary respect and
admiration?

I. Born in poverty and obscurity, in which he passed his early years;
with no advantages of education in the schools of his day, after he
entered his teens; under the condition of daily toil for his bread; he
had carried on, in spite of all obstacles, the process of self-education
through books and observation, and become in literature and science, as
well as in the practical affairs of every-day life, the best informed
man in America.

II. Apprenticed to a printer in his native Boston, at thirteen; a
journeyman in Philadelphia at seventeen; working at the case in London
at nineteen; back to the Quaker City, and set up for himself at
twenty-six; he had long since mastered all the details of a great
business, prepared to put his hand to any thing, from the trundling of
paper through the streets on a wheel-barrow to the writing of editorials
and pamphlets, and had earned for himself a position as the most
prosperous printer and publisher in the colonies.

III. Retired from active business at forty-six, considering that he had
already earned and saved enough to supply his reasonable wants for the
rest of his life; fired with ambition to do something for the
advancement of science; he had now for six years given himself to
philosophical investigation and experiment, among other things
demonstrated the identity of electricity as produced by artificial means
and atmospheric lightning, and made himself a name throughout the
civilized world.

IV. Besides, it must not be forgotten that he had all along been
foremost in many a work for the public good. The Franklin Library, of
Philadelphia, owes to him its origin. The University of Pennsylvania
grew out of an educational project in which he was a prime mover. And
his ideas as to the relative importance of ancient and modern _classics_
were more than a hundred years in advance of his times.

Such is a glimpse of Franklin at fifty-two, as preliminary to a single
episode which will occupy the rest of this chapter. But the episode
itself requires a special word.

V. For a quarter of a century Franklin had published an almanac under
the _pseudonym_ of Ri