The Project Gutenberg EBook of Sketches New and Old, Part 4.
by Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

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Title: Sketches New and Old, Part 4.

Author: Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens)

Release Date: June 26, 2004 [EBook #5839]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SKETCHES NEW AND OLD, PART 4. ***

Produced by David Widger

SKETCHES NEW AND OLD

by Mark Twain

Part 4.

THE LATE BENJAMIN FRANKLIN--[Written about 1870.]

["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just
as well."--B. F.]

This party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers. He was
twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of
Boston. These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them
worded in accordance with the facts. The signs are considered well
enough to have, though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out
the two birthplaces to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as
several times in the same day. The subject of this memoir was of a
vicious disposition, and early prostituted his talents to the invention
of maxims and aphorisms calculated to inflict suffering upon the rising
generation of all subsequent ages. His simplest acts, also, were
contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys
forever--boys who might otherwise have been happy. It was in this spirit
that he became the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no other reason
than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might
be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers.
With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work
all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the
light of a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that
also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them. Not satisfied
with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and
water, and studying astronomy at meal-time--a thing which has brought
affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's
pernicious biography.

His maxims were full of animosit