Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston in 1706, the fifteenth of a family of seventeen children. His father was a soap-boiler, and was kept pretty busy providing for his family, none of whom, with the exception of Benjamin, ever attained any especial distinction; this being one of those mysteries of nature, which no one has ever been able to explain, and yet which happens so often--the production of an eagle in a brood of common barnyard fowls--a miracle, however, which never happens except when the barnyard fowls are of the human species. Benjamin himself, at first, was only an ugly duckling in no way remarkable. At the age of ten, he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer, and needed a boy to do the dirty work around the office, and thought there was no need of paying good money to an outsider, when it might just as well be kept in the family. So Benjamin went to work sweeping out, and washing up the dirty presses, and making himself generally useful during the day; but--and here is the first gleam of the eagle's feather--instead of going to bed with the sun as most boys did, he sat up most of the night reading such books and papers as he was able to get hold of at the office, or himself writing short articles for the paper which his brother published. These he slipped unsigned under the front door of the office, so that his brother would not suspect they came from him; for no man is a prophet to his own family, and these contributions would have promptly gone into the waste basket had his brother suspected their source. As it was, however, they were printed, and not until Benjamin revealed their authorship did his brother discover how bad they were. After he had served in the printing office for seven years, Benjamin came to the conclusion that his family would never appreciate him at his real worth. He was like most boys in this, differing from them only in being right. So he sold some of his books, and without saying anything to his father or brother, who would probably have reasoned him out of his purpose with a cowhide whip, he hid himself on board a boat bound for New York. Arrived there, he soon discovered that printers and budding geniuses were in no great demand, and so proceeded on to Philadelphia, partly on foot and partly by water.