h the freedom
of the city; and the University of St. Andrews conferred on him the
degree of Doctor of Laws; later, Oxford did the same. He even had time
for a trip into the Low Countries. As months and finally years slipped
away, with just enough of occupation of a dignified character to save
him from an annoying sense of idleness, with abundant opportunities for
social pleasure, and with a very gratifying deference shown towards
himself, Franklin, who liked society and did not dislike flattery, began
to think the mother country no such bad place. For an intellectual and
social career London certainly had advantages over Philadelphia. Mr.
Strahan, the well-known publisher of those days, whom Franklin used
affectionately to call Straney, became his close friend, and was very
insistent with him that he should leave the provinces and take up a
permanent residence in England. He baited his hook with an offer of his
son in marriage with Franklin's daughter Sarah. He had never seen Sarah,
but he seems to have taken it for granted that any child of her father
must be matrimonially satisfactory. Franklin wrote home to his wife that
the young man was eligible, and that there were abundant funds in the
Strahan treasury, but that he did not suppose that she would be able to
overcome her terror of the ocean voyage. Indeed, this timidity on the
part of his wife was more than once put forward by him as if it were
really the feather which turned the scale in the choice of his future
residence.

Franklin himself also was trying his hand at match-making. He had taken
a great fancy to a young lady by the name of Mary Stevenson, with whom,
when distance prevented their meeting, he kept up a constant
correspondence concerning points of physical science. He now became very
pressing with his son William to wed this learned maiden; but the young
man possibly did not hold a taste for science to be the most winning
trait in woman; at any rate, having bestowed his affections elsewhere,
he refused to transfer them. So Franklin was compelled to give up his
scheme, though with an extreme reluctance, which he expressed to the
rejected damsel with amusing openness. Had either of these matrimonial
bonds been made fast, it is not improbable that Franklin would have
lived out the rest of his life as a friend of the colonies in England.
But his lot was otherwise cast; a second time he escaped, though
narrowly, the prospect of dying an Englishman and the