out of business a few months after he started. He returned to Cambridge for two years and was employed by his father. In 1692 we find him again engaged in printing in Boston, where he continued to conduct an establishment for forty years. In it was produced the first American newspaper, the "Boston News-Letter," a weekly; No. 1 being dated April 24, 1704, and printed for John Campbell, postmaster.

One other printer was to be found within the territory of the English Colonies during the closing days of the Seventeenth Century, and he was destined to have a good deal to do with the affairs of Benjamin Franklin. He was William Bradford, a Quaker, and the son of a printer, one among the first immigrants to the new settlement on the Delaware River, where he arrived in 1682. He returned to London, where he married the daughter of Andrew Sowle, a printer, and came again to Philadelphia in 1685, bearing a letter from George Fox, the Quaker, introducing him as a sober young man who was on his way to Philadelphia to set up the trade of printing Friends' books. His first known work is dated 1686, and because of inadvertent and apparently harmless reference to the government authorities he got into difficulty with them. This difficulty continued until 1693, when having received an invitation from the Governor of New York to remove to that province and

a guarantee of two hundred dollars a year and the public printing, Bradford removed to New York and became the first printer of that province, continuing to be the only printer in it for thirty years. He established the "New York Gazette” in 1725, thus becoming New York's first newspaper publisher. He is said, although without authority, to have been of noble birth, and he always sealed with a crest showing his coat of arms.

CHAP. I I.

Young Franklin as a Printer's Devil.

JOSIAH FRANKLIN, dissenter and dyer, removed from Banbury in Oxfordshire, England, to Boston in New England, with his wife and three children in 1685. After the birth of four more children his wife died, and later he married Abiah Folger and by this marriage had ten children, a total of seventeen, of whom ten were sons and seven were daughters. Benjamin was the tenth and youngest son and the fifteenth child.

Although Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the reform of the Julian calendar in 1582, and it was in that year adopted by all Roman Catholic countries, Great Britain and her colonies delayed until 1752 before doing likewise. Therefore, in the old public Register of Births, still preserved in the

Mayor's office in Boston, it is recorded that Benjamin Franklin, son of Josiah and Abiah Franklin, Benjamenson of Josiah Frank thig Kabiak hellere born @ Juny 1706 mydia daught of Josiah Frankenty & Abiak hy wife born & Any 1708 Record of the birth of Benjamin Franklin in the Register of Births in the Mayor's office in Boston.

was born January 6, 1706. With the adoption of the reformed calendar came an advance of eleven days, and accordingly the day of the birth, as we now have it, is January 17.

The location of the birthplace is usually given as Milk Street, opposite South Meeting House, where the records of the Town of Boston show Josiah Franklin was granted liberty to build a house eight feet square on land belonging to Lieut. Nathaniel Reynolds. Josiah Franklin later occupied a house "at the sign of the Blue Ball," corner of Hanover and Union streets. Jared Sparks, whose edition of Franklin's works was published in 1840, satisfied himself that the removal did not occur until after Benjamin's birth. Subsequent investigation by Samuel G. Drake, whose authoritative "History and Antiquities of the City of Boston" was published in 1854, seems to establish the fact that Benjamin was born in the larger house.

The day of the birth was a Sunday, and the pious father took the baby boy from his humble cottage to the South Meeting House, and he was there baptized under the name of his paternal

uncle Benjamin, at that time living in England, and who became later the only member of the numerous Franklin family to join Josiah in the New World.

Benjamin being the tenth son was considered to be something in the nature of a tithe, and this fact and his very evident fondness for reading, indicating a tendency toward a literary pursuit, caused his father to decide that the boy should become a minister of the church. Accordingly, in order to give him an education, at the age of eight years he was placed in the Boston grammar school and in less than a year rose to the head of his class. Proving to be deficient in mathematics, he was next sent to a teacher noted for ability to instruct in writing and arithmetic, but although Benjamin remained a year, he made but little progress. Josiah Franklin, finding that the income from his business as a maker of candles and soap, which he had adopted because there was small demand for his services as a dyer, was hardly sufficient to meet the needs of his family and keep the younger children at school, withdrew his son from the school-the two years mentioned being Benjamin's sole experience in educational institutions.

The ministry project being abandoned, Josiah took the boy into his own establishment, intending to teach him the soap- and candle-making trade, and he continued there until he was twelve years of age. The work proved to be distasteful and

fearing that Benjamin would follow his oldest brother's example and run away to sea, the father wisely decided to find a more agreeable trade for

him.

Accordingly, father and son together visited the workshops of the town, and finally it was decided that he should take up the trade of cutlery, his cousin Samuel, son of the elder Benjamin, being established in Boston in that line. Benjamin was employed there for a short time only, his departure resulting from the inability of his father and his cousin to agree upon the price to be paid for his instruction at the trade, it being the custom of the time for a master not only to receive the services of an apprentice free, but to be paid for the tuition, the sum for such a trade as cutlery being about one hundred dollars.

At about this time Benjamin's older brother James, a printer, had but recently returned from England with a printing outfit, and it was proposed to Benjamin that he adopt the trade of printing. The early Boston printers enumerated in the previous chapter had removed or died and at the time there were but two other printing establishments in the town, one conducted by Thomas Fleet in Pudding Lane and the other by Samuel Kneeland in Prison Lane. James Franklin had established himself on the corner that later became Franklin Avenue and Court Street.