Ben Franklin of Old Philadelphia: Chapters 1–5

The town was built around the harbor and the wharf, where sailing ships put in from England, bringing news and goods from the great world to the colonists.

Boys built forts and stockades and played Indian, put together homemade boats and sailed the ponds as pirates, explored the woods and swam in the blue water.

He would settle down by the hearth and read by the light of the fire, or by the crooked candles that came from the tallow shop.

These were candles that had not been perfect enough to sell, and they were apt to flicker.

"What do you want to do?” Mr. Franklin asked.
"Go to sea,” his son said, promptly. "I want to be a sailor.”

Will you hear of a bloody battle,
Lately fought upon the seas?
It will make your ears rattle
And your admiration cease.
Have you heard of Teach, the Rover,
And his knavery on the Main;
How of gold he was a Lover,
How he loved all ill-got Gain?

He would take several paragraphs of a book he was reading and turn them into verses. Later on, when he had pretty well forgotten the prose he had rhymed, he would take his verses and turn them back into the original prose. This was the way he learned new words.

On Sunday, he was supposed to go to church, as was everybody else. Before Ben became an apprentice he had been obliged to go to church, for there wasn't any way out of it.

So he stayed home and worked, but his conscience bothered him. This may have made him work harder, because he felt that it was his duty to be at church.

"I don’t understand why you can’t eat what everybody else eats," James said testily.

Then, at the print shop, he started to boil up rice and potatoes and to make hasty pudding—a delicacy that was something like cornmeal mush and was usually eaten with molasses.

After all, Boston already had two newspapers, the Boston News-Letter and the Boston Gazette, and what use was there for another one?

Ben wrote many of these secret, anonymous pieces, and when his brother’s friends continued to praise them, his vanity finally overcame him and he admitted that he was the author.

Although the elder Franklin often sided with his younger son, he still impressed on Benjamin the importance of James’ position as master and Ben’s need for humility as an apprentice.

Ben resented this fiercely, largely because the punishments seemed to him too big to fit the crimes. He despised these beatings and resented James’ right to give them to him.

While James was in jail, Ben edited the New England Courant, and every time he had a chance, he made a few slighting remarks about the Assembly of Massachusetts.

His failure to go to church and some of the things he had said about religion had resulted in people looking at him with horror and calling him an infidel.

It was crowded with people who jostled Ben at the railing as they set out.

The great waves caught the little boat in their troughs and spun it around.

To make matters worse, he was sick with a fever from exposure in the ferryboat, and he had too little money to buy medicine.

He was dirty and bedraggled and his clothes were a sight to see.

Never had Ben been more downcast. He did not know how he would live until Tuesday, for his money was almost gone.

The next morning they poled out of the creek and saw the spires of Philadelphia.

He went gawking up the street until he saw a boy eating a piece of bread.

The baker handed him three enormous puffy rolls. Ben was flabbergasted. He didn’t know what to do with them.

As he trudged down Market Street toward Fourth, he passed a pretty girl standing in her father’s doorway.

Though Boston was a huddle of weathered gray houses, rising above the blue harbor, Philadelphia was a town of bright colors.

Most of the shop fronts were painted red, blue, green, or yellow, and the big swinging signs in front of them were brilliant with paint and gilt.

Everybody was upset and worried, he said, over the prodigal son.

“Mind your own business!” Mr. Keimer shouted to Ben, and came racing upstairs to reprimand his employee for leaving his work.

Hugh Meredith was delighted because he still had several months of apprenticeship there, and, of course, Ben was idle and needed the money.

He used to buy the paper for his newspaper and trundle it through the streets on a wheelbarrow, so he was also a truckman.

He opened a stationery store, so he was also a merchant.

Almanacs were the weather bureaus of those days, claiming to forecast the weather and setting down the changes of the moon and the times of the tides. They also contained riddles, jokes, little poems, proverbs, odd facts, recipes, tips on planting the garden, superstitions, and a hodgepodge of all kinds of things.

When he wrote his will, after he had been Ambassador to the Court of France, he began it: "I, Benjamin Franklin, printer....”