PREFACE.

XV

to all our May-day meetings, our ragged Lools, our city missions, and pretended love of destitute, the weak, and the suffering. We longer wonder that the atrocities of the French stille roused the Parisian people to rush off in body and tumble the old prison-citadel down

a heap of ruins; and if Tothill Fields lay oss the Channel, the same indignant outrage ght perhaps be again enacted. But here, good y citizens as we are, we pay our poor-rates; call ourselves miserable sinners, in a loud ce, once a week, from a cosy pew; our "good y" belongs to a district visiting society, and tributes tracts in the back slums; we put our eck into the plate, after a bottle or two of port, a charity dinner; and, this done, we are selfatent.

We once passed a quiet half hour with Mr. Cal■ft, the hangman, and in the course of the consation he alluded to Mrs. Calcraft! The words sooner fell upon the ear than a world of wonfilled the brain. Even he, then, had somedy to care about him. There was somebody hug and caress him before he left his home in at scratch wig and fur cap in which we saw n come disguised to Newgate (for the "roughs" d threatened to shoot him), and carrying that all ominous satchel basket, at two in the morng, on the day of Bousfield's execution.

The wretched lads in Tothill Fields prison are orse off than Calcraft himself. They have no-dy in the world to care about them.

Nobody! Yet, stay, we forget; there is this same Calcraft to look after a good many of them:

In fine-to drop the author and speak in propria personá-I have attempted to write a book which, while it treated of some subject that a boy would be likely to attend to, should at the same time admit of enunciating such principles as I wished my own boy, and other boys as good, and as honest, and earnest as he, to carry with them through life; and yet I have striven, while writing it, to do no positive violence to truth either in the love of one's art or in the heat of one's "purpose." In plain English, I have sought to be consistent to nature-true to the spirit, perhaps, rather than the letter of things-even though I had a peculiar scheme to work out. And now, such as it is, I give the present volume to the youth of the time, in the hope that it may serve them for what I myself felt the want of more than any thing after leaving Westminster School, as a young man crammed to the tip of one's tongue with Latin and Greek and nothing else, viz., for something like a guide to what Uncle Ben calls "the right road through life."

Hr. M.

YOUNG BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

PART I.

YOUNG BEN'S LOVE OF THE SEA, AND HOW HE WAS WEANED FROM IT.

CHAPTER I.

LL WHAT EVER SHALL WE DO WITH THE BOY?"

A PRETTY chubby-faced boy, with a pair of cheeks rosy and plump as ripe peaches, was Master Benjamin Franklin in his teens.

Dressed in a tiny three-cornered hat, a very small pair of "smalls," or knee-breeches, and a kind of little, stiff-skirted, fan-tailed surtout, he looked like a Greenwich pensioner in miniature, or might have been mistaken (had the colors been gayer) for the little fat fairy coachman to Cinderella's state carriage.

It would have made a pretty picture to have handed down to our time could an artist have sketched the boy, as he sat beside his toy ship, in the old-fashioned, dark back parlor behind the tallow-chandler's store, "at the corner of Hanover and Union Streets," in the city of Boston, New England.

Över the half curtain of a glass door a long deep fringe of white candles, varied with heavy, tassellike bunches of "sixes" and "eights," might be seen dangling from the rafters of the adjoining

B

shop, with here and there several small stacks of yellow and white soap, in ingot-like bars, ranged along the upper shelves; and the eye could also catch glimpses of the square brown paper cap which crowned the head of Josiah Franklin (the proprietor of the establishment, and father of our Benjamin) wandering busily about, as the shopbell was heard to tinkle-tinkle with the arrival of fresh customers, seeking supplies of the "best mottled" or "dips."

The back parlor itself, being lighted only from the shop, was dim as a theatre by day, so that all around was wrapped in the rich transparent brown shade of what artists call "clear obscure." The little light pervading the room shone in faint lustrous patches upon the bright pewter platters and tin candlesticks that were arranged as ornaments on the narrow wooden mantelpiece, while it sparkled in spots in one corner of the apartment, where, after a time, the eye could just distinguish a few old china cups and drinking-glasses set out on the shelves of the triangular cupboard.

In this little room sat Benjamin's mother, spinning till the walls hummed like a top with the drone of her wheel, and his sister Deborah, who was busy making a mainsail for the boy's cutter out of an old towel, now that she had finished setting the earthen porringers for the family supper of bread and milk; while young Ben himself appeared surrounded with a litter of sticks intended for masts and yards, and whipcord for rigging, and with the sailless hull of his home-made vessel standing close beside him on its little stocks (made out of an inverted wooden footstool), and seeming as if ready to be "laid up in ordinary"-under the dresser.

The boy had grown tired of his daily work; for the candle-wicks which his father had set him to

cut lay in tufts about the deck of his boat, and the few snips of cotton on the sanded floor told how little of his task he had done since dinner-time.*

Indeed, it did not require much sagacity to perceive that Benjamin hated the unsavory pursuits of soap-boiling and candle-making, and delighted in the more exciting enterprises of shipping and seafaring. On the bench at his elbow was the bundle of rushes that had been given him to trim, in readiness for what was his especial horror-the approaching "melting-day," together with the frame of pewter moulds that required to be cleaned for the new stock of "cast candles." But both of these were in the same state as he had received them in the morning; whereas the coat of the boy, and the ground all about him, were speckled with chips from the old broomstick that he had been busy shaping into a main-mast for his miniature yacht, and near at hand were two small pipkins filled with a pennyworth of black and white paint, with which he had been striping the sides of the little vessel, and printing the name of the "FLYING DUTCHMAN, OF BOSTON," upon her stern.

The craft itself did no small credit to young Benjamin's skill as a toy ship-builder, though certainly her "lines" were more in the washing-tub style of naval architecture than the " wave-principle" of modern American clippers; for the hull

*"At ten years old," are Franklin's own words, given in the history of his boyhood, written by himself, "I was taken to help my father in his business, which was that of a tallowchandler and soap-boiler-a business to which he was not bred, but had assumed on his arrival in New England, because he found that his dyeing trade, being in little request, would not maintain his family. Accordingly, I was employed in cutting wicks for the candles, filling the moulds for 'cast candles,' attending to the shop, and going errands, etc." At the opening of our story, the lad is supposed to have been some time at this trade.