head of the family, in Queen Mary's reign, read from an English _Bible_
concealed under a stool, while a child watched for the coming of the
officers. He relates how he attended school from the age of eight to ten,
when he had to leave to help his father mold and wick candles. His meager
schooling was in striking contrast to the Harvard education of Cotton
Mather and the Yale training of Jonathan Edwards, who was only three years
Franklin's senior. But no man reaches Franklin's fame without an education.
His early efforts to secure this are worth giving in his own language:--

"From a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came
into my hands was ever laid out in books. Pleased with the _Pilgrim's
Progress_, my first collection was of John Bunyan's works in separate
little volumes.... Plutarch's _Lives_ there was in which I read
abundantly, and I still think that time spent to great advantage. There
was also a book of De Foe's, called an _Essay on Projects_, and another
of Dr. Mather's, called _Essays to do Good_, which perhaps gave me a turn
of thinking that had an influence on some of the principal future events
of my life.... Often I sat up in my room reading the greatest part of the
night."

He relates how he taught himself to write by reading and reproducing in his
own language the papers from Addison's _Spectator_. Franklin says that the
"little ability" in writing, developed through his self-imposed tasks, was
a principal means of his advancement in after life.

He learned the printer's trade in Boston, and ran away at the age of
seventeen to Philadelphia, where he worked at the same trade. Keith, the
proprietary governor, took satanic pleasure in offering to purchase a
printing outfit for the eighteen-year-old boy, to make him independent.
Keith sent the boy to London to purchase this outfit, assuring him that the