seems to have gathered strength from the soil, as families are wont to
do. Seeing how the Franklins, when the fit of emigrating seized upon
them, blossomed out momentarily, and then dwindled away, we are
reminded of Poor Richard's wise observation,--

"I never saw an oft-removed tree
Nor yet an oft-removed family
That throve so well as those that settled be."

About the year 1685, Josiah Franklin, the youngest of four sons, came
with his wife and three children to Boston. He had been a dyer in the
old home, but now in New England, finding little to be done in this
line, he set up as a tallow-chandler and soap-boiler, and prospered in
a small way. By his first wife he had four more children, and then by a
second wife ten others,--a goodly sheaf of seventeen, among whom
Benjamin, the destined philosopher, was the fifteenth.

The second wife, Benjamin's mother, was the daughter of Peter Folger,
one of the settlers of Nantucket,--"a godly and learned Englishman,"
who, like many of the pious New England folk, used to relieve his heart
in doggerel rhymes. In his "Looking-Glass for the Times" he appeals
boldly for liberty of conscience in behalf of the persecuted
Anabaptists and Quakers, and we are not surprised that Franklin should
have commended the manly freedom of these crude verses. Young Benjamin
was open to every influence about him, and something of the large and
immovable tolerance of his nature may have been caught from old Peter
Folger, his grandfather. We can imagine with what relish that sturdy
Protestant, if he had lived so long, would have received Benjamin's
famous "Parable against Persecution," which the author used to pretend
to read as the last chapter of Genesis, to the great mystification of
his audience,--"And it came to pass after these things that Abraham sat
in the door of his tent," etc. Try the trick to-day, and you will find
most of your hearers equally mystified, so perfectly has Franklin
imitated the tone of Old Testament language.

But we forget that our hero, like Tristram Shandy, is still in the
limbo of non-existence. Benjamin Franklin was born in Boston, January 6
(old style), 1706. At that time the family home was in Milk Street,
opposite the Old South Church, to which sacred edifice the child was
taken the day of his birth, tradition asserting that his own mother
carried him thither through the snow. Shortly afterwards the family
moved to a wooden house on the corner of Han