waste basket had his brother suspected
their source. As it was, however, they were printed, and not until
Benjamin revealed their authorship did his brother discover how bad they
were.

After he had served in the printing office for seven years, Benjamin
came to the conclusion that his family would never appreciate him at his
real worth. He was like most boys in this, differing from them only in
being right. So he sold some of his books, and without saying anything
to his father or brother, who would probably have reasoned him out of
his purpose with a cowhide whip, he hid himself on board a boat bound
for New York. Arrived there, he soon discovered that printers and
budding geniuses were in no great demand, and so proceeded on to
Philadelphia, partly on foot and partly by water.

Everyone knows the story of how he landed there, with only a few pennies
in his pocket, but with a sublime confidence in his ability to make
more; how he proceeded to the nearest bakeshop, asked for three pennies'
worth of bread, and when he was given three loaves, took them rather
than reveal his ignorance by confessing that he really wanted only one
loaf, and walked up Market street, with a loaf under each arm, and
eating the third. He has told the story in his inimitable way in his
autobiography, a work which gives him high place among American men of
letters. Small wonder that red-cheeked Deborah Reed smiled at him from
the door of her father's house--but Franklin saw the smile and
remembered it, and though it brought them both distress enough at first,
he asked Deborah to be his wife, six years later, and she consented, and
a good wife she made him. Years afterward, when he was Ambassador to
France and the pet of the French court, the centre of perhaps the most
brilliant and witty circle in Europe, the talk, one day, chanced to turn
upon tailors, of whom the company expressed the utmost detestation.
Franklin listened with a quiet smile, which some one at last observed.

"Don't you agree," he was asked, "that tailors are a conscienceless and
extortionate class?"

"No," he answered, still smiling; "how could I? You see, I'm in love
with mine."

And he told proudly and with shining eyes how the clothes he wore had
been spun into thread and woven into cloth and cut out and fitted and
sewed together by his wife's own hands; and it was no doubt Deborah he
had in mind when he said: "God bless all good women who help men to do
their work."