When the time comes we shall see that Franklin's scientific fame was a real aid to him in his diplomatic career; now we must turn our eyes backward and trace from the beginning his slow rise in political and civic power. And it is a peculiar feature of the day and of Franklin's individual character that many of his reforms took their start in the gayety of social intercourse. There was nothing morose, nothing stern, in our genial philosopher. Though always temperate, his vivacity and easy politeness made him welcome in any merry company of the day. He could sing with the best of the young blades and even compose his own ditties; and one of these songs, "The Old Man's Wish," he tells us he sang at least a thousand times. The chorus of the song is characteristic enough to be quoted:-- "May I govern my passions with absolute sway, Grow wiser and better as my strength wears away, Without gout or stone, by gentle decay;" and another ballad in praise of his wife still has a kind of popularity:-- "Of their Chloes and Phyllises poets may prate, I sing my plain country Joan, These twelve years my wife, still the joy of my life, Blest day that I made her my own." Franklin's first public improvement carries us back to the early leathern-apron days of the Junto. Books were a rare commodity among the frugal members of that club, and for a while they increased their resources by keeping all their volumes together in the club room for common use. But this plan proving hardly feasible, Franklin in the year 1731 drew up proposals for a city library. His method of arousing public interest in the scheme was one to which he always had recourse on such occasions, and is a credit to his modesty as well as to his shrewdness. "I put myself," he says, "as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading." He succeeded, as he always did in his projects, and the library, still an honored institution of Philadelphia, is the parent of all the subscription libraries of the country. Through the aid of the Junto, also, Franklin set in motion another project. As a boy he had seen the first fire company started in Boston, and now that his Quaker home had grown to be a thriving city, he undertook to introduce the same system there. No doubt many of our readers have seen the curious relics of these colonial fire companies,--old leathern buckets stamped with various devices and with the owner's name, which were used to pass water rapidly from hand to hand. The companies had a social as well as a useful aim, so that families were proud to preserve such memorials of the old days.