It is pleasant to know that Franklin observed the rules of life which he made.  And his wife, Deborah, was as busy and as frugal as himself.

They kept no idle servants.  Their furniture was of the cheapest sort.  Their food was plain and simple.

Franklin’s breakfast, for many years, was only bread and milk; and he ate it out of a twopenny earthen bowl with a pewter spoon.

But at last, when he was called one morning to breakfast, he found his milk in a china bowl; and by the side of the bowl there was a silver spoon.

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.

Benjamin Franklin held the office of deputy postmaster-general for the American colonies for twenty-one years.

In 1754 there was a meeting of the leading men of all the colonies at Albany.  There were fears of a war with the French and Indians of Canada, and the colonies had sent these men to plan some means of defence.

Benjamin Franklin was one of the men from Pennsylvania at this meeting.

He presented a plan for the union of the colonies, and it was adopted.  But our English rulers said it was too democratic, and refused to let it go into operation.

This scheme of Franklin’s set the people of the colonies to thinking.  Why should the colonies not unite?  Why should they not help one another, and thus form one great country?

And so, we may truthfully say that it was Benjamin Franklin who first put into men’s minds the idea of the great Union which we now call the United States of America.

The people of the colonies were not happy under the rule of the English.  One by one, laws were made which they looked upon as oppressive and burdensome.  These laws were not intended to benefit the American people, but were designed to enrich the merchants and politicians of England.

In 1757 the people of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Georgia, decided to send some one to England to petition against these oppressions.