The shop handled pamphlets and advertisements and such odd jobs. As a sideline they printed patterns on linen, calico, and silk “in good figures, very lively and durable colours.” In the second year of Benjamin’s apprenticeship, their fortunes improved with a substantial contract to print the Boston _Gazette_ for 40 weeks. The _Gazette_ was one of Boston’s two newspapers, both insufferably dull. When his contract came to an end, James decided to publish his own newspaper. His friends scoffed, saying that America had no need of still another newspaper! The first issue of James Franklin’s _New England Courant_ appeared August 7, 1721, during a smallpox epidemic—and was devoted to opposing the new “doubtful and dangerous practice” of smallpox inoculation. There is no evidence that young Benjamin took any stand—either for or against—in the controversy. The great advantage of working for his brother was that he had access to books. Several apprentices to booksellers with whom he made friends obligingly “loaned” him volumes from their masters’ shelves. So they could be returned early in the morning before they were missed, he often sat up all night reading. There was also a tradesman named Matthew Adams with his own library, who took a fancy to Benjamin and let him borrow what he chose. From reading he turned his hand to writing, composing a ballad called _The Lighthouse Tragedy_, the account of the drowning of a ship’s captain and his two daughters. James saw possibilities in this effort, printed it for Benjamin, then sent him out on the streets to sell it. (The story of young Benjamin Franklin hawking his ballads on the streets of Boston would much later bring tears to the eyes of his aristocratic French friends.) _The Lighthouse Tragedy_ was wonderfully popular, but his second ballad, a sailor’s song about a pirate, was such a dismal failure that he allowed his father to discourage him from trying others. “Verse-makers are usually beggars,” Josiah Franklin had commented. Prose was Benjamin’s next effort. His inspiration was a volume of the London _Spectator_, with essays by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, leading prose stylists of the eighteenth century. He made notes on their subject matter, laid the notes aside a few days, tried to reconstruct the original. He changed the essays into verse, endeavored to put them back to prose. Thus he strove to correct his own writing faults, on occasion having the thrill of finding he had in a phrase or expression improved the original. Both reading and writing were done on his own time, before the shop opened in the morning, at night, and on Sundays when his conscience let him miss church. And still there were never enough hours in the day for all the learning he sought.