e building stones and belonged to the workmen?"

"No, sir; I didn't know that they belonged to any one. I thought that
they belonged to everybody."

"You did, you little rascal! Then why did you wait to have the workmen
go away before you put them into the water?"

"The workmen would have hindered us, sir. They don't think that
improvements can be made by little shavers like us. I wanted to surprise
them, sir--to show them what we could do, sir."

"Benjamin Franklin," said Josiah, "come here, and I will show you what I
can do.--Stranger, the boy's godfather has come to live with us and to
take charge of him, and he does need a godfather, if ever a stripling
did."

Josiah Franklin laid his hand on the boy, and the workman went away. The
father removed the boy's jacket, and showed him what he could do, the
memory of which was not a short one.

"I did not mean any harm, father," young Benjamin said over and over.
"It was a mistake."

"My boy," said the tallow chandler, softening, "never make a second
mistake. There are some people who learn wisdom from their first
mistakes by never making second mistakes. May you be one of them."

"I shall never do anything that I don't think is honest, father. I
thought stones and rocks belonged to the people."

"But there are many things that belong to the people in this world that
you have no right to use, my son. When you want to make any more public
improvements, first come and talk with me about them, or go to your
Uncle Ben, into whose charge I am going to put you--and no small job he
will have of it, in my thinking!"

Benjamin Franklin said, when he was growing old and was writing his own
life, that his father _convinced_ him at the time of this event that
"that which is not honest could not be useful."

We can see in fancy his father with a primitive switch thus _convincing_
him. He never forgot the moral lesson.

Where was Jamie the Scotchman during this convincing episode? When he
heard that the little wharf-builder, bursting with desire for public
improvement, had fallen into disgrace, he came upon him slyly:

"So you've been building a wharf for the boys of the town. When one
begins so soon in life to improve the town, there can be no telling what
he will do when he grows up. Perhaps you will become one of the great
benefactors of Boston yet. Who knows?"

"We can't tell," said the future projector of Franklin Park,
philosophically.

"No, that is a fact, bubb