They kept no idle servants. Their furniture was of the cheapest sort.
Their food was plain and simple.
Franklin's breakfast, for many years, was only bread and milk; and he ate it out of a twopenny earthen bowl with a pewter spoon.
But at last, when he was called one morning to breakfast, he found his milk in a china bowl; and by the side of the bowl there was a silver spoon.
His wife had bought them for him as a surprise. She said that she thought her husband deserved a silver spoon and china bowl as well as any of his neighbors.
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XIII.—FRANKLIN'S SERVICES TO THE COLONIES.
And so, as you have seen, Benjamin Franklin became in time one of the foremost men in our country.
In 1753, when he was forty-five years old, he was made deputy postmaster-general for America.
He was to have a salary of about $3,000 a year, and was to pay his own assistants.
People were astonished when he proposed to have the mail carried regularly once every week between New York and Boston.