, as usual. Then the children kissed their
mother and Jenny and crept up to their chamber. The nine-o'clock bell
had rung, and the streets were still. The watchman with his lantern went
by, saying, "Nine o'clock, and all is well!" None of the family heard
him say, "Ten o'clock, and all is well!" They were in slumberland after
their hard, homely toil, and some of them may have been dreaming of the
good old Governor, who followed literally the words of the Master who
taught on the Mount of Beatitudes.

CHAPTER XIV.

THE TREASURE-FINDER.

LITTLE Benjamin once had the boy fever to go to sea. This fever was a
kind of nervous epidemic among the boys of the time, a disease of the
imagination as it were. Many boys had it in Boston; they disappeared,
and the town crier called out something like this:

"Hear ye!
Hear ye!
Boy lost--lost--lost!
Who returns him will be rewarded."

He rang the bell as he cried. The crier's was the first bell that was
rung in Boston.

But why did boys have this peculiar fever in Boston and other New
England towns at this time? It was largely owing to the stories that
were told them. Few things affect the imagination of a boy like a story.
De Foe's Robinson Crusoe was the live story of the times. Sindbad the
sailor was not unknown.

Old sailors used to meet by the Town Pump and spin wonderful "yarns," as
story-telling of the sea was then described.

But there was one house in Boston that in itself was a story. It was
made of brick, and rose over the town, at the North End, in the "Faire
Green Lane," now decaying Chatham Street. In it lived Sir William Phips,
or Phipps, the first provincial Governor under the charter which he
himself had brought from England.

Sir William had been born poor, in Maine, and had made his great fortune
by an adventure on the sea.

The story of Sindbad the Sailor was hardly more than a match for his,
with its realities.

He was one of a family of twenty-six children; he had been taught to
read and write when nearly grown up; had come to Boston as an
adventurer, and had found a friend in a comely and sympathetic widow,
who helped to educate him, and to whom he used to say:

"All in good time we will come to live in the brick house in the Faire
Green Lane."

A Boston boy like young Franklin, among the pots and kettles of life,
could not help recalling what this poor sailor lad had done