} money and agreeable daughters seem to have looked coldly upon his advances. Pity, it is said, is akin to love. It was so in Franklin's case. A sense of the great wrong he had done to Miss Read moved his repentant heart to commiserate her lonely condition. She was, he frankly tells us, "generally dejected, seldom cheerful, and avoided company." Franklin had kept up his acquaintance with the family, and had often been invited to their house, and consulted in their affairs. He now 'considered his giddiness and inconstancy when in London as in a great degree the cause of her unhappiness; "though the mother," he remarks, was good enough to think the fault more her own than mine, as she had prevented our marrying before I went thither, and persuaded the other match in my absence." 66 Their mutual affection was revived; but there were now great objections to the union. The person whom she had married was perhaps alive, and though he was said to have a previous wife still living in England, yet certainty could not be arrived at, owing to the distance. Besides, he had left debts behind him, which, in case of his death, Franklin might be called upon to pay. But love and pity triumphed over all difficulties, and they were married, September 1st, 1730, when he was nearly twenty-five years of age. "Thus," says Franklin, "I corrected that great erratum as well as I could." The marriage was a fortunate one, his wife proving "a good and faithful helpmate," assisting him much by attending to the shop; and there being a mutual endeavor to make each other happy. It was while these love affairs were going on, that Franklin wrote to his sister Jane, now Mrs. Mecom. It might be expected that he would say something to her about a matter which so deeply concerned him, but he was silent; and indeed, nothing was then settled. But he mentioned a remedy for cancer, a disease, which, "is often thought incurable." "Yet we have here in town," he writes, “a kind of shell made of some wood, cut at a proper time, by some man of great skill (as they say), which has done wonders in that disease among us, being worn for some time on the breast. I am not apt to be superstitiously fond of believing such things, but the instances are so well attested as sufficiently to convince the most incredulous. "This, if I have interest enough to procure, as I think I have, I will borrow for a time, and send it to you; and hope the doctors will at least allow the experiment to be tried." And this from Benjamin Franklin! But then he was only a young man of twenty-four. He did not forget his parents: "You have mentioned," he says, "nothing in your letter of our dear parents; but I conclude they are well, because you say nothing to the contrary." CHAPTER XV. Book-sellers.-A Library. Readers of Books in AT the time Franklin established himself in Philadelphia, there was not a good book-seller's shop in any one of the colonies south of Boston. "In New York and Philadelphia, the printers were indeed," he says, "stationers, but they sold only paper, almanacs, ballads, and a few common school-books. Those who loved reading were obliged to send for their books from England; the members of the Junto had each a few." He proposed that the members should bring their books into the little room of Mr. Grace's, where the club was accustomed to meet, that they might be consulted during the discussions, or borrowed to read at home. This plan continued about a year, and was then given up. "Finding," says Franklin, "the advantage of this little collection, I proposed to render the benefit from the books more common, by commencing a public subscription library,"- his first project of a public nature. He drew up a plan and rules, which he had put in the form of articles of agreement by a skillful conveyancer. Each subscriber was to pay down a certain sum for the first purchase of the books, and an annual contribution for increasing them. "So few," he says, were the readers at that time in Philadelphia, and the majority of us so poor, that I was not able with great industry to find more than fifty persons, mostly young tradesmen, willing for this purpose to pay down forty shillings each, and ten shillings per annum. With this little sum we began. The books were imported; the library was opened one day in the week for lending them to the subscribers, on their promissory notes to pay double the value if not duly returned. The institution soon manifested its utility, was imitated by other towns, and in other provinces. The libraries were augmented by donations; reading became fashionable; some people, having no public amusements to direct their attention from study, became better acquainted with books; and in a few years were observed by strangers to be better informed and more intelligent than people of the same rank generally are in their countries. "When we were about to sign the above-mentioned articles, which were binding on us, our heirs, etc., for fifty years, Mr. Brackden, the scrivener, said to us, 'You are youngmen, but it is scarcely probable that any of you will live to see the expiration of the term fixed in the instrument.' A number of us, however, are yet living, fifty three years after, in 1784; but the instrument was after a few years [in 1742] rendered null by a charter that incorporated and gave perpetuity to the company." Franklin's name stands first on the list of the persons who applied for the charter. The library is at present one of the largest in the country. In 1789, a year before his death, a spacious and elegant building was erected to contain it. In a niche in front is a marble statue of the founder, executed in Italy. Franklin's peculiar character appears in the method he employed to obtain subscriptions, and in his remarks about it. "The objections and reluctances I met with," he says, "made me soon feel the impropriety of presenting one's self as the proposer of any useful project, that might be supposed to raise one's reputation in the smallest degree above that of one's neighbors, where one has need of their assistance to accomplish that project. I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading. In this way my affair went on more smoothly, and I ever after practiced it on such occasions; and, from my frequent successes, car heartily recommend it. The present little sacrifice of your vanity will afterward be amply repaid. If it remains awhile uncertain to whom the merit belongs, some one more vain than yourself may be encouraged to claim it, and then even envy will be disposed to do you justice, by plucking those assumed feathers, and restoring them to their right owner. "This library afforded the means of improvement by constant study, for which I set apart an hour or two each day; and thus repaired in some degree the loss of the learned education my father once intended me for. Reading was the |