gave him instructions about its remittance. The money was duly collected by Franklin on his way to Philadelphia, but unfortunately for him his youthful friend Collins, before his departure from Boston, had decided to remove to Pennsylvania, too, and proceeding from Boston to New York in advance of him, was his companion from New York to Philadelphia. While awaiting Franklin's arrival at New York, Collins drank up and gambled away all his own money. The consequence was that Franklin had to pay his lodging for him at New York and defray all his subsequent expenses. The journey to Philadelphia could be completed only with the aid of the Vernon debt, and, after the two reached Philadelphia, Collins, being unable to obtain any employment because of his bad habits, and knowing that Franklin had the balance of the Vernon collection in his hands, repeatedly borrowed sums from him, promising to repay them as soon as he was earning something himself. By these loans the amount collected for Mr. Vernon was finally reduced to such an extent that Franklin was at a painful loss to know what he should do in case Mr. Vernon demanded payment. The thought of his situation haunted him for some years to come, but happily for him Mr. Vernon was an exception to the saying of Poor Richard that creditors are a superstitious sect, great observers of set days and times. He kindly made no demand upon Franklin for quite a long period, and in the end merely put him in mind of the debt, though not pressing him to pay it; whereupon Franklin wrote to him, we are told by the _Autobiography_, an ingenuous letter of acknowledgment, craved his forbearance a little longer, which was granted, and later on, as soon as he was able to do so, paid the principal with interest and many thanks. Just why Mr. Vernon was such an indulgent creditor the _Autobiography_ does not reveal. If, as Franklin subsequently wrote to Strahan, the New England people were artful to get into debt and but poor pay, Mr. Vernon at any rate furnishes evidence that they could be generous lenders. Perhaps Mr. Vernon simply had his favorable prepossessions like many other men who knew Franklin in his early life, or perhaps he had some of Franklin's own quick sympathy with the trials and struggles of youth, and was not averse to lending him the use, even though compulsory, of a little capital, or, perhaps, he was restrained from dunning Franklin by his friendship for Franklin's brother. The _erratum_ into which Franklin fell in writing and publishing his free-thinking dissertation on _Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain_, which was dedicated to his friend Ralph, he revised, as we have seen, by destroying all the copies upon which he could lay his hands and also, we might add, by a counter pamphlet in which he recanted and combated his own reasonings. In his unreflecting hours he mixed the poison; in his more reflective hours he compounded the antidote.