[30] It may be said of the fame of Washington in his own land, with something like approximate accuracy, that a file of wild geese winging its flight along the Atlantic Seaboard from Maine to the alluvial meadows of the Roanoke in Southern Virginia, is, for but brief periods only out of sight of some statue or monument erected in his honor by his grateful countrymen. The fame of Franklin in America is but little less strikingly attested. As long ago as 1864, Parton could say this of it: "As there are few counties in the Union which have not a town named Franklin, so there are few towns of any magnitude, which do not possess a Franklin Street, or a Franklin Square, a Franklin hotel, a Franklin bank, a Franklin fire-engine, a Franklin Lyceum, a Franklin lodge, or a Franklin charitable association. His bust and his portrait are only less universal than those of Washington, and most large cities contain something of the nature of a monument to Franklin." How little this fame has died down since these words were written was seen in the pomp and splendor with which the second centenary of the birth of Franklin was celebrated in the United States and France in 1906. [31] Another story of Franklin's told by Jefferson is good enough at any rate for a footnote. At parties at the French Court he sometimes had a game of chess with the old Duchess of Bourbon. Happening once to put her king into prize, he took it. "Ah," said she, "we do not take kings so." "We do in America," said he. [32] It may be said of Ralph that few names are surer of immortality than his, though not for the reasons upon which he founded his deceitful hopes. Between the _Autobiography_ and the _Dunciad_ he is, not unlike a mummy, preserved long beyond the date at which, in the ordinary course of things, he would have been overtaken by oblivion. This is one of the couplets that Pope bestowed upon him in the _Dunciad_: "Silence, ye Wolves! While Ralph to Cynthia howls, And makes night hideous--answer him, ye owls."