They beat them and "Molly" had the satisfaction of long enjoying the fame that came to John, instead of wearing the widow's weeds. The victory was decisive and by a band of raw militia, poorly armed and without discipline, but led by one of the most fearless men of the revolution.
Of the one thousand British soldiers engaged in this fight, not more than a hundred escaped, and it was this victory of "Old Bennington" which led ultimately to the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga. Col. Baum, who was mortally wounded, said of the provisionals, "They fought more like hell-hounds than like soldiers." Washington spoke of the engagement as "the great stroke struck by Gen. Stark near Bennington" and Baroness Riedessel, then in the British camp, wrote: "This unfortunate event paralyzed our operations."
"Old Bennington" was a splendid type of the class of men who gave success to the American Revolution. Congress, after Bennington, hastened to repair its former action by appointing Stark a brigadier-general, and he continued in the army till the end of the war. He lived to see the country firmly established, and when he died in 1822 he was buried on the banks of the Merrimac River at Manchester.
[BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.]
By George Fitch.
Benjamin Franklin was an ordinary man with an extraordinary supply of common sense who flourished in the eighteenth century and is still regarded as one of the finest of American products.
Franklin was born in Boston, but was one of the few Boston wise men to succeed in getting away from that city. His family was not distinguished and when he left Boston, after having run a newspaper with more brilliance than success, no committee of city officials appeared to bid him goodbye.
Franklin arrived in Philadelphia with enough money left to buy two rolls of bread and paraded the town wearing one loaf under his arm and eating the other. This successfully quarantined him from Philadelphia society and he was enabled to put all his time into the printing business with such success that he was sent to London in 1824 by the governor to get a printing outfit. He worked for eighteen months in a London printing house and was probably the most eminent employee that London Journalism ever had, though England has not yet waked up to this fact.