humor: "and, indeed, I have since learnt that immense fortunes are often made in such employments." Those, however, were simple, provincial days. In place of the money which he did not get, also of the further sum which he actually lost, he had to satisfy himself with the consolation derived from the approbation of the Pennsylvania Assembly, while also Braddock's dispatches gave him a good name with the officials in England, which was of some little service to him. A more comical result of the Braddock affair was that it made Franklin for a time a military man and a colonel. He had escaped being a clergyman and a poet, but he could not escape that common fate of Americans, the military title, the prevalence of which, it has been said, makes "the whole country seem a retreat of heroes." It befell Franklin in this wise: immediately after Braddock's defeat, in the panic which possessed the people and amid the reaction against professional soldiers, recourse was had to plain good sense, though unaccompanied by technical knowledge. No one, as all the province knew, had such sound sense as Franklin, who was accordingly deputed to go to the western frontier with a small volunteer force, there to build three forts for the protection of the outlying settlements. "I undertook," he says, "this military business, though I did not conceive myself well qualified for it." It was a service involving much difficulty and hardship, with some danger; General Braddock would have made a ridiculous failure of it; Franklin acquitted himself well. What he afterward wrote of General Shirley was true of himself: "For, tho' Shirley was not bred a soldier, he was sensible and sagacious in himself, and attentive to good advice from others, capable of forming judicious plans, and quick and active in carrying them into execution." In a word, Franklin's military career was as creditable as it was brief. He was called forward at the crisis of universal dismay; he gave his popular influence and cool head to a peculiar kind of service, of which he knew much by hearsay, if nothing by personal experience; he did his work well; and, much stranger to relate, he escaped the delusion that he was a soldier. So soon as he could do so, that is to say after a few weeks, he returned to his civil duties. But he had shown courage, intelligence, and patriotism in a high degree, and he had greatly increased the confidence reposed in him by his fellow citizens.