dition remains. It was an unconventional wedding gift to bring
home to a bride; but Mrs. Franklin, with a breadth and liberality of
mind akin to her husband's, readily took the babe not only to her home
but really to her heart, and reared him as if he had been her own
offspring. Mr. Parton thinks that Franklin gave this excellent wife no
further cause for suspicion or jealousy.

CHAPTER II

A CITIZEN OF PHILADELPHIA: CONCERNMENT IN PUBLIC AFFAIRS

So has ended the first stage, in the benign presence of Hymen. The
period of youth may be regarded as over; but the narrative thereof,
briefly as it has been given, is not satisfactory. One longs to help out
the outline with color, to get the expression as well as merely the
features of the young man who is going to become one of the greatest men
of the nation. Many a writer and speaker has done what he could in this
task, for Franklin has been for a century a chief idol of the American
people. The Boston boy, the boy printer, the runaway apprentice, the
young journeyman, friendless and penniless in distant London, are
pictures which have been made familiar to many generations of
schoolboys; and the trifling anecdote of the bread rolls eaten in the
streets of Philadelphia has for its only rival among American historical
traditions the more doubtful story about George Washington, the
cherry-tree, and the little hatchet.

Yet, if plain truth is to be told, there was nothing unusual about this
sunrise, no rare tints of divine augury; the luminary came up in
every-day fashion. Franklin had done much reading; he had taken pains to
cultivate a good style in writing English; he had practiced himself in
dispute; he had adopted some odd notions, for example vegetarianism in
diet; he had at times acquired some influence among his fellow
journeymen, and had used it for good; he had occasionally fallen into
the society of men of good social position; he had kept clear of the
prevalent habit of excessive drinking; sometimes he had lived frugally
and had laid up a little money; more often he had been wasteful; he had
been very dissolute, and in sowing his wild oats he had gone down into
the mud. His autobiography gives us a simple, vivid, strong picture,
which we accept as correct, though in reading it one sees that the lapse
of time since the occurrences narrated, together with his own success
and distinction in life, have not been without their obvious effect. By
the time he t