r education with so
many mouths to feed.

Young Ben did not like his occupation in the candle shop. He worked with
his hands while his heart was absent, and his imagination was even
farther away.

He had a brother John who had helped his father when a boy, who married
and moved to Rhode Island to follow there his father's trade as a candle
and soap maker. John's removal doubled the usefulness of little Ben
among the candle molds and soap kettles. He saw how this kind of work
would increase as he grew older; he longed for a different occupation,
something that would satisfy his mental faculties and give him
intellectual opportunities, and his dreams went sailing to the seas and
lands where his brother Josiah had been. There were palms in his fancy,
gayly plumed birds, tropical waters, and a free life under vertical
suns--India, the Spanish Main, the ports of the Mediterranean. He talked
so much of going to sea that his father saw that his shop was not the
place for this large-brained boy with an inventive faculty.

"Ben," said Josiah Franklin one day, "this is no place for you--you are
not balanced like other boys; your head is canted the _other_ way.
You'll be running off to sea some day, just as Josiah did. Come, let us
go out into the town, and I will try to find another place for you. You
will have to become an apprentice boy."

"Anything, father, but this dull work. I seem here to be giving all my
time to nothing. Soap and candles are good and useful things, but people
can make them who can do nothing else. I want a place that will give me
a chance to work with my head. What is my head for?"

"I don't know, Ben; it will take time to answer that. You do seem to
have good faculties, if you _are_ my son. I would be glad to have you do
the very best that you are capable of doing, and Heaven knows that I
would give you an education if I were able. Come, let us go."

They went out into the streets of Boston town. The place then contained
something more than two thousand houses, most of them built of timber
and covered with cedar shingles; a few of them were stately edifices of
brick and tiles. It had seven churches, and they were near the sign of
the Blue Ball: King's Chapel, Brattle Street, the Old Quaker, the New
North, the New South, the New Brick, and Christ Church. There was a free
writing school on Cornhill, a school at the South End, and another
writing school on Love Lane. Ben Franklin could not enter these