CHAPTER XVI. 



THE printer's boy, who had landed hungry, footsore 

 and all but penniless at the Market Street wharf in Phila- 

 delphia, after a hard journey by both sea and land from 

 Boston, was now, twenty-three years later, the chief citi- 

 zen of the growing town. To no one did that community 

 then owe so much as it did to Benjamin Franklin. 1 The 

 once runaway apprentice had organized its police, founded 

 its school (destined afterwards to become one of the great 

 universities of the world) devised for it a system of fire 

 protection, established its Philosophical Society and its 

 public library (the first in the colonies), printed its books 

 and its newspapers, supplied it with concentrated worldly 

 wisdom in the maxims of Poor Richard, served it in var- 

 ious official capacities, and invented for it the stoves to 

 which it still clings. Of the magnificent services which 

 he was later to render, not to his town, but to his country, 

 Franklin, at forty years of age, had doubtless no anticipa- 

 tion. The time seemed to him near at hand when he 

 might relinquish some of the many tasks imposed upon 

 him when the grind of money-getting might cease, and 

 when with the modest fortune which tireless endeavor and 

 patient frugality had brought to him, he might turn, not 

 to idleness, but to work which, through the pleasure it af- 

 forded, bore no resemblance to toil. As his inclinations 

 were to philosophic study, this it was now his ambition 

 uninterruptedly to pursue. 



l l have followed the autobiography of Franklin as edited by the Hon. 

 John Bigelow, in his fine edition of Franklin's Works, N Y., 1889. Par- 

 ton's Life and Times of Franklin, New York, 1864, has a chapter (vol. 

 i, c. ix.) devoted to "Franklin and Electricity," but the errors in it are 

 many. Weems' biography is chiefly a work of pure imagination. 



(537) 



