His maxims were full of animosity toward boys.  Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin, on the spot.  If he buys two cents’ worth of peanuts, his father says, “Remember what Franklin has said, my son—­’A grout a day’s a penny a year"’; and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts.  If he wants to spin his top when he has done work, his father quotes, “Procrastination is the thief of time.”  If he does a virtuous action, he never gets anything for it, because “Virtue is its own reward.”  And that boy is hounded to death and robbed of his natural rest, because Franklin, said once, in one of his inspired flights of malignity: 

               Early to bed and early to rise
               Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise.

As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.  The sorrow that that maxim has cost me, through my parents, experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell.  The legitimate result is my present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration.  My parents used to have me up before nine o’clock in the morning sometimes when I was a boy.  If they had let me take my natural rest where would I have been now?  Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.

And what an adroit old adventurer the subject of this memoir was!  In order to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday he used to hang a key on the string and let on to be fishing for lightning.  And a guileless public would go home chirping about the “wisdom” and the “genius” of the hoary Sabbath-breaker.  If anybody caught him playing “mumblepeg” by himself, after the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be ciphering out how the grass grew—­as if it was any of his business.  My grandfather knew him well, and he says Franklin was always fixed—­always ready.  If a body, during his old age, happened on him unexpectedly when he was catching flies, or making mud-pies, or sliding on a cellar door, he would immediately look wise, and rip out a maxim, and walk off with his nose in the air and his cap turned wrong side before, trying to appear absent-minded and eccentric.  He was a hard lot.

He invented a stove that would smoke your head off in four hours by the clock.  One can see the almost devilish satisfaction he took in it by his giving it his name.

He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia for the first time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four rolls of bread under his arm.  But really, when you come to examine it critically, it was nothing.  Anybody could have done it.

To the subject of this memoir belongs the honor of recommending the army to go back to bows and arrows in place of bayonets and muskets.  He observed, with his customary force, that the bayonet was very well under some circumstances, but that he doubted whether it could be used with accuracy at a long range.