s this led to some
inconvenience at his boarding-house, he made this cunning proposition to
his master:

"Give me one-half the money you pay for my board and I will board
myself."

The master consenting, the apprentice lived entirely on such things as
hominy, bread, rice, and potatoes, and found that he could actually live
upon half of the half. What did the calculating wretch do with the
money? Put it into his money-box? No; he laid it out in the improvement
of his mind.

When at the age of seventeen, he landed in Philadelphia, a runaway
apprentice, he had one silver dollar and one shilling in copper coin. It
was a fine Sunday morning, as probably the reader remembers, and he knew
not a soul in the place. He asked the boatmen upon whose boat he had
come down the Delaware how much he had to pay. They answered, Nothing,
because he had helped them row. Franklin, however, insisted upon their
taking his shilling's worth of coppers, and forced the money upon them.
An hour after, having bought three rolls for his breakfast, he ate one
and gave the other two to a poor woman and her child who had been his
fellow-passengers. These were small things, you may say; but remember he
was a poor, ragged, dirty runaway in a strange town, four hundred miles
from a friend, with three pence gone out of the only dollar he had in
the world.

Next year when he went home to see his parents, with his pocket full of
money, a new suit of clothes and a watch, one of his oldest Boston
friends was so much pleased with Franklin's account of Philadelphia that
he determined to go back with him. On the journey Franklin discovered
that his friend had become a slave to drink. He was sorely plagued and
disgraced by him, and at last the young drunkard had spent all his money
and had no way of getting on except by Franklin's aid. This hard,
calculating, mercenary youth, did he seize the chance of shaking off a
most troublesome and injurious traveling companion? Strange to relate,
he stuck to his old friend, shared his purse with him till it was empty,
and then began on some money which he had been intrusted with for
another, and so got him to Philadelphia, where he still assisted him. It
was seven years before Franklin was able to pay all the debt incurred by
him to aid this old friend, for abandoning whom few would have blamed
him.

A year after he was in still worse difficulty from a similar cause. He
went to London to buy types and a press with whi