She gazed into his eyes silently.

"Who told you, mother?"

"My soul."

"Well, I've come back like the prodigal son. Let me give you a smack.
You'll take me in--but how about father? I thought I heard him playing
the violin."

"Josiah, that is your voice!" exclaimed Josiah the elder. "Now my cup
of joy is full and running over. Josiah, come in out of the storm."

Josiah Franklin rushed to the door and locked his son in his arms, but
there was probably but little sentiment in the response.

"Now I _know_ the parable of the prodigal son," said he. "I had only
read it before. Come in! come in! There are brothers and sisters here
whom you have never seen. Now we are all here."

Uncle Benjamin wrote a poem to celebrate young Josiah's return. It was
read in the family, with disheartening results. Sailor Josiah said that
he "never cared much for poetry." The poem may be found in the large
biographies of Franklin.

CHAPTER III.

BENJAMIN AND BENJAMIN.

AN old man sat by an open fire in a strange-looking room with a little
boy on his knee. Beside him was a middle-aged man, the father of the
boy.

"Brother Josiah," said the old man, "I have had a hard, disappointed
life, but I have done the best that I could, and there has nothing
happened since my own children died and my hair turned gray that has
made me so happy as that letter that you sent to me in England in which
you told me that you had named this boy for me."

"It makes me happy to see you here by my fire to-night, with the boy in
your lap," said the father. "Benjamin and Benjamin! My heart has been
true to you in all your troubles and losses, and I would have helped you
had I been able. How did you get up the resolution to cross the sea in
your old age?"

"Brother Josiah, it was because my own son is here, and he was all that
I had left of my own family. But that was not all. In one sense my own
life has failed; I have come down to old age with empty hands. When your
letter came saying that you had named this boy for me, and had made me
his godfather, I saw that you pitied me, and that you had a place for
me in your heart. I thought of all the years that we had passed together
when we were young; of the farm and forge in Ecton; of Banbury; of the
chimes of Nottingham; of all that we were to each other then.

"I was all alone in London, and there my heart turned to you as it did
when we were boys. That gave me resolution to cross the sea, Brother