r
after year the sayings of Richard Saunders, the alleged publisher, and
Bridget, his wife, creations of Franklin's fancy, were printed in the
almanac. Years later the most striking of these sayings were collected
and published. This work has been translated into as many as twenty
languages and is still in circulation today.

Franklin kept a shop in connection with his printing office, where he
sold a strange variety of goods: legal blanks, ink, pens, paper, books,
maps, pictures, chocolate, coffee, cheese, codfish, soap, linseed
oil, broadcloth, Godfrey's cordial, tea, spectacles, rattlesnake root,
lottery tickets, and stoves--to mention only a few of the many articles
he advertised. Deborah Read, who became his wife in 1730, looked after
his house, tended shop, folded and stitched pamphlets, bought rags,
and helped him to live economically. "We kept no idle servants,"
says Franklin, "our table was plain and simple, our furniture of the
cheapest. For instance, my breakfast was a long time bread and milk (no
tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen porringer with a pewter
spoon."

With all this frugality, Franklin was not a miser; he abhorred the
waste of money, not the proper use. His wealth increased rapidly. "I
experienced too," he says, "the truth of the observation, 'THAT AFTER
GETTING THE FIRST HUNDRED POUND, IT IS MORE EASY TO GET THE SECOND,
money itself being of a prolific nature." He gave much unpaid public
service and subscribed generously to public purposes; yet he was able,
at the early age of forty-two, to turn over his printing office to one
of his journeymen, and to retire from active business, intending to
devote himself thereafter to such public employment as should come his
way, to philosophical or scientific studies, and to amusements.

From boyhood Franklin had been interested in natural phenomena. His
"Journal of a Voyage from London to Philadelphia", written at sea as he
returned from his first stay in London, shows unusual powers of exact
observation for a youth of twenty. Many of the questions he propounded
to the Junto had a scientific bearing. He made an original and important
invention in 1749, the "Pennsylvania fireplace," which, under the name
of the Franklin stove, is in common use to this day, and which brought
to the ill-made houses of the time increased comfort and a great saving
of fuel. But it brought Franklin no pecuniary reward, for he never
deigned to patent any of his inven