At length my brother-in-law, master of a sloop, heard of me, and wrote exhorting me to return, to which I answered in a letter which came under the eyes of Sir William Keith, governor of the province.  He was surprised when he was told my age, and said that I ought to be encouraged; if I would set up in Philadelphia he would procure me the public business.

Sir William promised to set me up himself.  I did not know his reputation for promises which he never meant to keep, and at his suggestion I sailed for England to choose the types.  Understanding that his letters recommendatory to a number of friends and his letter of credit to furnish me with the necessary money, which he had failed to give me before the ship sailed, were with the rest of his despatches, I asked the captain for them, and when we came into the Channel he let me examine the bag.  I found none upon which my name was put as under my care.  I began to doubt his sincerity, and a fellow passenger, on my opening the affair to him, let me into the governor’s character, and told me that no one had the smallest dependence on him.

I immediately got work at Palmer’s, a famous printing-house in Bartholomew Close, London.  I was employed in composing for the second edition of Wollaston’s “Religion of Nature,” and some of his reasonings not appearing to me well-founded, I wrote a little metaphysical piece entitled “A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain.”  This brought me the acquaintance of Dr. Mandeville, author of the “Fable of the Bees,” a most facetious, entertaining companion.  I presently left Palmer’s to work at Watts, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and here I continued for the rest of my eighteen months in London.  But I had grown tired of that city, and when a Mr. Denham, who was returning to Philadelphia to open a store, offered to take me as his clerk, I gladly accepted.

We landed in Philadelphia on October 11, 1726, where I found sundry alterations.  Keith was no longer governor; and Miss Read, to whom I had paid some courtship, had been persuaded in my absence to marry one Rogers, a potter.  With him, however, she was never happy, and soon parted from him; he was a worthless fellow.  Mr. Denham took a store, but died next February, and I returned to Keimer’s printing-house.

II.—­Making His Way

I had now just passed my twenty-first year; and it may be well to let you know the then state of my mind with regard to my principles and morals.  My parents had brought me through my childhood piously in the dissenting way, but now I had become a thorough Deist.  My arguments had perverted some others, but as each of these persons had afterwards wronged me greatly without the least compunction, and as my own conduct towards others had given me great trouble, I began to suspect that this doctrine, though it might be true, was not very useful.  I now, therefore, grew convinced that truth, sincerity, and integrity between man and man were of the utmost importance to the felicity of life; and I formed written resolutions to practice them ever while I lived.