ia. Amid much bad companionship he fell
in with some clever men. His friend James Ralph, though a despicable,
bad fellow, had brains and some education. At this time, too, Franklin
was in the proselyting stage of infidelity. He published "A Dissertation
on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain," and the pamphlet got him
some little notoriety among the free-thinkers of London, and an
introduction to some of them, but chiefly of the class who love to sit
in taverns and blow clouds of words. Their society did him no good, and
such effervescence was better blown off in London than in Philadelphia.

But after the novelty of London life had worn off, it ceased to be to
Franklin's taste. He began to reform somewhat, to retrench and lay by a
little money; and after eighteen months he eagerly seized an
opportunity which offered for returning home. This was opened to him by
a Mr. Denham, a good man and prosperous merchant, then engaged in
England in purchasing stock for his store in Philadelphia. Franklin was
to be his managing and confidential clerk, with the prospect of rapid
advancement. At the same time Sir William Wyndham, ex-chancellor of the
exchequer, endeavored to persuade Franklin to open a swimming school in
London. He promised very aristocratic patronage; and as an opening for
money-getting this plan was perhaps the better. Franklin almost closed
with the proposition. He seems, however, to have had a little touch of
homesickness, a preference, if not quite a yearning, for the colonies,
which sufficed to turn the scale. Such was his third escape; he might
have passed his days in instructing the scions of British nobility in
the art of swimming! He arrived at home, after a tedious voyage, October
11, 1726. But almost immediately fortune seemed to cross him, for Mr.
Denham and he were both taken suddenly ill. Denham died; Franklin
narrowly evaded death, and fancied himself somewhat disappointed at his
recovery, "regretting in some degree that [he] must now sometime or
other have all that disagreeable work to go over again." He seems to
have become sufficiently interested in what was likely to follow his
decease, in this world at least, to compose an epitaph which has become
world-renowned, and has been often imitated:--

THE BODY
OF
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
(LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK,
ITS CONTENTS TORN OUT,
AND STRIPT OF ITS LETTERING AND GILDIN