At the age of ten, he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer, and needed a boy to do the dirty work around the office, and thought there was no need of paying good money to an outsider, when it might just as well be kept in the family. So Benjamin went to work sweeping out, and washing up the dirty presses, and making himself generally useful during the day; but—and here is the first gleam of the eagle's feather—instead of going to bed with the sun as most boys did, he sat up most of the night reading such books and papers as he was able to get hold of at the office, or himself writing short articles for the paper which his brother published. These he slipped unsigned under the front door of the office, so that his brother would not suspect they came from him; for no man is a prophet to his own family, and these contributions would have promptly gone into the waste basket had his brother suspected their source. As it was, however, they were printed, and not until Benjamin revealed their authorship did his brother discover how bad they were.
After he had served in the printing office for seven years, Benjamin came to the conclusion that his family would never appreciate him at his real worth. He was like most boys in this, differing from them only in being right. So he sold some of his books, and without saying anything to his father or brother, who would probably have reasoned him out of his purpose with a cowhide whip, he hid himself on board a boat bound for New York. Arrived there, he soon discovered that printers and budding geniuses were in no great demand, and so proceeded on to Philadelphia, partly on foot and partly by water.
Everyone knows the story of how he landed there, with only a few pennies in his pocket, but with a sublime confidence in his ability to make more; how he proceeded to the nearest bakeshop, asked for three pennies' worth of bread, and when he was given three loaves, took them rather than reveal his ignorance by confessing that he really wanted only one loaf, and walked up Market street, with a loaf under each arm, and eating the third. He has told the story in his inimitable way in his autobiography, a work which gives him high place among American men of letters. Small wonder that red-cheeked Deborah Reed smiled at him from the door of her father's house—but Franklin saw the smile and remembered it, and though it brought them both distress enough at first, he asked Deborah to be his wife, six years later, and she consented, and a good wife she made him. Years afterward, when he was Ambassador to France and the pet of the French court, the centre of perhaps the most brilliant and witty circle in Europe, the talk, one day, chanced to turn upon tailors, of whom the company expressed the utmost detestation. Franklin listened with a quiet smile, which some one at last observed.
"Don't you agree," he was asked, "that tailors are a conscienceless and extortionate class?"
"No," he answered, still smiling; "how could I? You see, I'm in love with mine."
And he told proudly and with shining eyes how the clothes he wore had been spun into thread and woven into cloth and cut out and fitted and sewed together by his wife's own hands; and it was no doubt Deborah he had in mind when he said: "God bless all good women who help men to do their work."
The young adventurer had no difficulty in finding employment as a printer, for printers were in demand in that Quaker city. He prospered from the first, and at the age of twenty-four, had a little business of his own, and was editing the Pennsylvania Gazette. Two years later, he began the publication of an almanac purporting to be written by one Richard Saunders, and which soon won an immense reputation as "Poor Richard's Almanac." As an almanac, it did not differ much from others, but, in addition to the usual information about the tides and changes of the moon and seasons of the year, it contained a wealth of wise and witty sayings, many of which have passed into proverbs and are in common use to-day. Here are a few of them:
Virtue and a trade are a child's best portions.
Write injuries in dust, benefits in marble.
The way to be safe is never to be secure.