Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own WritingsBruce, Wiliam Cabell
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Benjamin Franklin, Self-Revealed, Volume 1 (of 2): A Biographical and Critical Study Based Mainly on his own Writings
Bruce, Wiliam Cabell
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790
I was directed [he says] to their house, and we found
them both alive, but weak with age, very glad however
to see us. She seems to have been a very smart,
sensible woman. They are wealthy, have left off
business, and live comfortably. They have had only one
child, a daughter, who died, when about thirty years of
age, unmarried. She gave me several of my uncle
Benjamin's letters to her, and acquainted me where the
other remains of the family lived, of which I have,
since my return to London, found out a daughter of my
father's only sister, very old, and never married. She
is a good, clever woman, but poor, though vastly
contented with her situation, and very cheerful. The
others are in different parts of the country. I intend
to visit them, but they were too much out of our tour
in that journey.
This was in 1758. Mary Fisher had good reason to be weak with age; for this
letter states that she was five years older than Franklin's sister Dowse,
and remembered her going away with Franklin's father and his first wife and
two other children to New England about the year 1685, or some
seventy-three years before Franklin's visit to Wellingborough.
"Where are the old men?
I who have seen much,
Such have I never seen."
Only the truly gray earth, humming, as it revolves on its axis, the
derisive song, heard by the fine ear of Emerson, could ask this question,
unrebuked by such a stretch of human memory as that. The letter then goes
on to say that from Wellingborough the writer passed to Ecton, about three
or four miles away, where Franklin's father was born, and where his father,
grandfather, and great-grandfather had lived, and how many of the family
before them they knew not.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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