off on "our informant" and go right along with the paper. You had
to go to jail, while your subscribers wondered why their paper did not
come, and the paste soured in the tin dippers in the sanctum, and the
circus passed by on the other side.

How many of us to-day, fellow-journalists, would be willing to stay in
jail while the lawn festival and the kangaroo came and went? Who of all
our company would go to a prison-cell for the cause of freedom while a
double-column ad. of sixteen aggregated circuses, and eleven congresses
of ferocious beasts, fierce and fragrant from their native lair, went by
us?

At the age of seventeen Ben got disgusted with his brother, and went to
Philadelphia and New York, where he got a chance to "sub" for a few
weeks and then got a regular "sit."

Franklin was a good printer, and finally got to be a foreman. He made an
excellent foreman, sitting by the hour in the composing-room and
spitting on the stove, while he cussed the make-up and press-work of the
other papers. Then he would go into the editorial rooms and scare the
editors to death with a wild shriek for more copy.

He knew just how to conduct himself as a foreman so that strangers would
think he owned the paper.

[Illustration: FRANKLIN AS FOREMAN.]

In 1730, at the age of twenty-four, Franklin married, and established
the _Pennsylvania Gazette_. He was then regarded as a great man, and
almost every one took his paper.

Franklin grew to be a great journalist, and spelled hard words with
great fluency. He never tried to be a humorist in any of his newspaper
work, and everybody respected him.

Along about 1746 he began to study the habits and construction of
lightning, and inserted a local in his paper in which he said that he
would be obliged to any of his readers who might notice any new or odd
specimens of lightning, if they would send them in to the _Gazette_
office for examination.

Every time there was a thunderstorm Franklin would tell the foreman to
edit the paper, and, armed with a string and an old door-key, he would
go out on the hills and get enough lightning for a mess.

[Illustration: FRANKLIN EXPERIMENTING WITH LIGHTNING.]

[Illustration: FRANKLIN VISITING GEORGE III.]

In 1753 Franklin was made postmaster of the Colonies. He made a good
Postmaster-General, and people say there were fewer mistakes in
distributing their mail then than there have ever been since. If a man
mailed a letter in those days, old Be