ontained reflections of a very high
nature." He was sentenced to a month's imprisonment and forbidden to
publish the paper. So James went to jail, and he left the management of
the paper to Benjamin.

This incident gives us a remarkable view of the times. But Boston was
only following the English law and custom.

The printing office was now carried on in Benjamin's name. Little Ben
grew and flourished, until his popularity excited the envy of his
brother. One day they quarreled, and James, almost in the spirit of
Cain, struck his bright, enterprising apprentice. Benjamin had a proud
heart. He would not stand a blow from James without a protest. What was
he to do?

He resolved to leave the office of his brother James forever. He did so,
and tried to secure work elsewhere. His brother's influence prevented
him from doing this. His resentment against his brother grew more
bitter, and blinded him to all besides. This was conduct unworthy of a
young philosopher. In his resentment he does not seem to have regarded
the feelings of his good father, or the heart of his mother that would
ache and find relief in tears at night, nor even of Jenny, whom he
loved. He took a sloop for New York, and bade good-by to no one. The
sail dipped down the harbor, and the three hills of Boston faded from
his view.

He was now on the ocean, and out in the world alone. We are sorry to say
that he faced life with such a deep resentment toward his brother in his
heart. He afterward came to regard his going away in this manner as one
of the mistakes of his life which he would wish to correct. His better
heart came back again, true to his home.

He was not popular in Boston in his last days there. New influences had
come into his life. He had loved argument and disputation, and there is
a subtile manner of discussion called the "Socratic method," which he
had found in Xenophon, in which one confuses an opponent by asking
questions and never making direct assertions himself, but using the
subjunctive mood. It is an art of entanglement. The boy had delighted in
"twisting people all up," and making them contradict themselves after a
perversion of the manner described by Xenophon in his Life of Socrates.

As religion and politics formed the principal subjects of these
discussions, and he liked to take the unpopular view in order to throw
his mental antagonist, he had fallen into disfavor, to which disesteem
his brother's charges against him had ad