anklin, you just put up your kite and
attend to the candle molds, and let swimmin' in the air all go. Whatever
may happen on this planet, _you'll_ never be likely to move the world
with a kite, of all things, nor with anything else, for that matter. So
it looks to me, and I'm generally pretty far-sighted. It takes practical
people to do practical things. Still, the old Bible does say that 'where
there is no vision the people perish.' Well, I don't know--as I said, we
can not always tell--David slew a giant with a pebble stone, and you may
come to somethin' by some accident or other. I'm sure I wish you well.
It may be that your uncle Benjamin, the poet, will train you when he
comes to understand you, but his thoughts run to kite-flyin' and such
things, and he never has amounted to anything at all, I'm told. You was
named after him, and rightly, I guess. He would like to have been a
Socrates. But the tape measure wouldn't fit his head."

He saw a shade in the boy's face, and added:

"_He's_ going to live here, they say. Then there will be two of you, and
you could fly kites and make up poetry together, if it were not for a
dozen mouths to feed, which matters generally tend to bring one down
from the sky."

An older son of Josiah Franklin appeared.

"James," said Jamie, "here's your brother Ben; he's been sailin' with
the sail in the sky. He ought to be keerful of his talents. There's no
knowin' what they may lead up to. When a person gets started in such
ways as these there's no knowin' how far he may go."

Brother James opened the weather door at the Blue Ball. The bell tinkled
and Ben followed him in, and the two sat down to bowls of bread, sweet
apples, and milk.

"What have you been doing, Ben?" asked Brother James.

Little Ben did not answer. He got up from the table and went away
downhearted, with his face in his jacket sleeve. It hurt him to be
laughed at, but his imagination was a comforting companion to him in
hours like these.

He could go kite-flying in his mind, and no one could see the flight.

"One can not make an eagle run around a barnyard like a hen," said a
sage observer of life. There was the blood of noble purposes in little
Ben Franklin's vein, if his ancestors were blacksmiths and his
grandmother had been a white slave whose services were bought and sold.
He had begun kite-flying; he will fly a kite again one day.

CHAPTER VI.

LITTLE BEN'S GUINEA PIG.

BEN loved little animal