"Dear kindred blood! How I do love you all!" the exclamation of Daniel Webster, might as well have issued from the great, loving heart of Franklin. Like the brethren of Joseph, the son of Jacob, pretty much all of his contemporary relations came to share in one way or another in the good fortune of the only prosperous member of the family. Franklin was too young to have ever met the two brothers of his father, who lived and died in England--John, the Banbury dyer, with whom Franklin's paternal grandfather, Thomas resided in his old age, and with whom Franklin's father served an apprenticeship, and Thomas, the Ecton forerunner of Franklin himself, whom we have already mentioned. But his paternal uncle, Benjamin, who followed Franklin's father to New England, and lived in the same house with him for some years, Franklin did know, and brings before us quite clearly in the _Autobiography_. He was bred a silk dyer in England, was an ingenious and very pious man, we are assured by his nephew, and died at a great age. It was to the warm affection that existed between this uncle, whose grandson, Samuel Franklin, was one of Franklin's correspondents, and Franklin's father that Franklin owed his Christian name. Besides being a dyer, a great attender of sermons of the best preachers, "which he took down in his shorthand," he was, the _Autobiography_ states, a poet, and "also much of a politician; too much, perhaps, for his station." In his agreeable life of Franklin, Parton has this to say of the uncle's poetry books. The poetry books of Uncle Benjamin, which are still in perfect preservation, though it is a hundred and eighty years since he bought the first of them, are neatly written and carefully indexed. Many of the pieces are acrostics, and several are curiously shaped on the page-dwindling or expanding in various forms, according to the quaint fancy of the poet. No true poet, of course, ever had the patience to index his poems, and the best that can be said of the uncle as a poet is that, though he did not reach even the lowest slopes of Parnassus, he attained a point distinctly nearer to its base than the nephew ever did. Every family event seems to have been a peg for him to hang a verse upon, and among his lines are these sent across the Atlantic in return for something from the pen of his nephew who was at that time about seven years of age: "'Tis time for me to throw aside my pen, When hanging sleeves read, write, and rhyme like men, This forward spring foretells a plenteous crop; For, if the bud bear grain, what will the top! If plenty in the verdant blade appear, What may we not soon hope for in the ear! When flowers are beautiful before they're blown, What rarities will afterward be shown."