r his heroic resistance. Paul
Jones, tradition says, on hearing of the honor conferred on
Pearson, good-naturedly observed, "If I ever meet him again, I'll
make a lord of him."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN

CHAPTER I

EARLY YEARS

It is a lamentable matter for any writer to find himself compelled to
sketch, however briefly, the early years of Benjamin Franklin. That
autobiography, in which the story of those years is so inimitably told,
by its vividness, its simplicity, even by its straightforward vanity,
and by the quaint charm of its old-fashioned but well-nigh faultless
style, stands among the few masterpieces of English prose. It ought to
have served for the perpetual protection of its subject as a copyright
more sacred than any which rests upon mere statutory law. Such, however,
has not been the case, and the narrative has been rehearsed over and
over again till the American who is not familiar with it is indeed a
curiosity. Yet no one of the subsequent narrators has justified his
undertaking. Therefore because the tale has been told so often, and once
has been told so well, and also in order that the stone which it is my
lot to cast upon a cairn made up of so many failures may at least be
only a small pebble, I shall get forward as speedily as possible to that
point in Franklin's career where his important public services begin, at
the same time commending every reader to turn again for further
refreshment of his knowledge to those pages which might well have
aroused the envy of Fielding and Defoe.

Franklin came from typical English stock. For three hundred years,
perhaps for many centuries more, his ancestors lived on a small freehold
at Ecton in Northamptonshire, and so far back as record or tradition ran
the eldest son in each generation had been bred a blacksmith. But after
the strange British fashion there was intertwined with this singular
fixedness of ideas a stubborn independence in thinking, courageously
exercised in times of peril. The Franklins were among the early
Protestants, and held their faith unshaken by the terrors of the reign
of Bloody Mary. By the end of Charles the Second's time they were
non-conformists and attendants on conventicles; and about 1682 Josiah
Franklin, seeking the peaceful exercise of his creed, migrated to
Boston, Massachusetts. His first wife bore him seven children, and died.
Not satisfied, he took in second nuptials Abiah Folger, "daughter of
Peter Folger, one o