Ben evidently had a mind open to suggestive influences, for the remark about running away prompted him to do so.  He sold some of his books and got himself secreted on board a ship about to sail for New York.

Arriving at New York, in three days he found the broad-brimmed Dutch had small use for printers and no special admiration for the art preservative; and he started for Philadelphia.

Every one knows how he landed in a small boat at the foot of Market Street with only a few coppers in his pocket, and made his way to a bakeshop and asked for a threepenny loaf of bread, and being told they had no threepenny loaves, then asked for threepenny’s worth of any kind of bread, and was given three loaves.  Where is the man who in a strange land has not suffered rather than reveal his ignorance before a shopkeeper?  When I was first in England and could not compute readily in shillings and pence, I would toss out a gold piece when I made a purchase and assume a ’igh and ’aughty mien.  And that Philadelphia baker probably died in blissful ignorance of the fact that the youth who was to be America’s pride bought from him three loaves of bread when he wanted only one.

The runaway Ben had a downy beard all over his face, and as he took his three loaves and walked up Market Street, with a loaf under each arm, munching on the third, he was smiled upon in merry mirth by the buxom Deborah Read, as she stood in the doorway of her father’s house.  Yet Franklin got even with her, for some months after, he went back that way and courted her, grew to love him, and they “exchanged promises,” he says.  After some months of work and love-making, Franklin sailed away to England on a wild-goose chase.  He promised to return soon and make Deborah his wife.  But he wrote only one solitary letter to the broken-hearted girl and did not come back for nearly two years.

* * * * *

Time is the great avenger as well as educator; only the education is usually deferred until it no longer avails in this incarnation, and is valuable only for advice—­and nobody wants advice.  Deathbed repentances may be legal-tender for salvation in another world, but for this they are below par, and regeneration that is postponed until the man has no further capacity to sin is little better.  For sin is only perverted power, and the man without capacity to sin neither has ability to do good—­isn’t that so?  His soul is a Dead Sea that supports neither ameba nor fish, neither noxious bacilli nor useful life.  Happy is the man who conserves his God-given power until wisdom and not passion shall direct it.  So, the younger in life a man makes the resolve to turn and live, the better for that man and the better for the world.