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.

* * * * *

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.

Letters starting from Philadelphia on Monday morning would reach Boston
the next Saturday night. This was thought to be a wonderful and almost
impossible feat. But nowadays, letters leaving Philadelphia at midnight
are read at the breakfast table in Boston the next morning.

At that time there were not seventy post-offices in the whole country.
There are now more than seventy thousand.