Francis Folger, the only legitimate child of Franklin except Sally, is not mentioned in his correspondence with his wife. The colorless Franky who is was not this child. Franklin's son was born a year after the marriage of Franklin and Deborah in 1730, and died, when a little more than four years of age, and therefore long before the date of the earliest letter extant from Franklin to Deborah. Though warned but a few years previously by an epidemic of smallpox in Philadelphia, which had been accompanied by a high rate of mortality, Franklin could not make up his mind to subject the child to the hazards of inoculation. The consequence was that, when a second epidemic visited the city, Francis contracted the disease, and died. Franklin, to use his own words to his sister Jane Mecom, long regretted him bitterly, and also regretted that he had not given him the disease by inoculation. All, who have seen my grandson [he said in another letter to his sister] agree with you in their accounts of his being an uncommonly fine boy, which brings often afresh to my mind the idea of my son Franky, though now dead thirty-six years, whom I have seldom since seen equaled in every thing, and whom to this day I cannot think of without a sigh. But Sally and his grandson were far from being the only persons who furnished material for Franklin's letters to his wife. These letters also bring before us in many ways other persons connected with him and Deborah by ties of blood, service or friendship. He repeatedly sends his "duty" to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Read, and when he is informed of the death of "our good mother," as he calls her, he observes, "'Tis, I am sure, a Satisfaction to me, that I cannot charge myself with having ever fail'd in one Instance of Duty and Respect to her during the many Years that she call'd me Son." "My love to Brother John Read and Sister, and cousin Debbey, and young cousin Johnny Read, and let them all know, that I sympathize with them all affectionately," was his message to her relations in the same letter. Some of his letters conveyed much agreeable information to Deborah about his and her English relations. Of these we shall have something to say in another connection.