very unhappy for want of a suitable gratification of their more delicate, because better instructed, tastes and appetites. A story is credited to Josiah by Franklin which is quite in the manner of the son. When Charles the First ordered his proclamation authorizing sports on Sunday to be read in all churches, many clergymen complied, some refused and others hurried it through as indistinctly as possible. But a certain clergyman to the surprise of his congregation read it distinctly. He followed the reading, however, with the Fourth Commandment, _Remember to keep holy the Sabbath Day_, and then said, "Brethren, I have laid before you the Command of your King, and the Commandment of your God. I leave it to yourselves to judge which of the two ought rather to be observed." It is to be wished that Franklin could have given us in the _Autobiography_ a companion portrait of his mother also; but this he has not done. He tells us little more than that she was the daughter of Peter Folger, a resident of Nantucket, had, like her husband, an excellent constitution, and suckled all her ten children--a point of capital importance with her son. Franklin further tells us that he never knew either his father or his mother to have any sickness but that of which they died, he at eighty-nine and she at eighty-five. They were both buried in Boston, and rested for many years under a monument, erected over their graves by Franklin, with a happy inscription from his pen, until this monument, having fallen into a state of dilapidation, was replaced in 1827 by a more durable one, erected by a number of citizens of Boston, who were desirous, as their supplementary inscription states, of reminding succeeding generations that he was born in Boston. In his inscription, Franklin, true to his ideals, states with pride that Josiah and Abiah lived lovingly together in wedlock fifty-five years, and, without an estate, or any gainful employment, by constant labor and industry, with God's blessing, maintained a large family comfortably, and brought up thirteen children and seven grandchildren reputably. In the light of the altered domestic standards of the present time, it requires some little effort, after reading these words, to accept the subsequent statement in the inscription that Josiah was not only a pious but a "prudent" man. Peter Folger was evidently regarded by Franklin with distinct favor because of his tolerant characteristics. The flower of tolerance did not often lift up its head in the frigid air of what some one has wittily styled the "ice age" of New England history. In the _Autobiography_, Franklin speaks of Folger as one of the first settlers of New England, of whom honourable mention is made by Cotton Mather, in his church history of that country, entitled _Magnolia Christi Americana_, as "_a godly, learned Englishman_," if he remembers the words rightly.