After this circuit of the various handicrafts, Josiah decided to make a cutler of Benjamin, and he placed him on probation with Samuel Franklin, a cutler, and a son of Josiah's brother, Benjamin. But Samuel thought that he should be paid a fee for instructing his cousin, and the suggestion was so displeasing to Josiah that he took the lad back to his own home. He doubtless felt that Samuel might have remembered whose roof it was that had sheltered his father when the latter first came over from England to Boston. The real inclination, however, that Benjamin discovered at this period of his life was for books. His father observed it, and decided to make a printer of him, and it was when James, an older son of Josiah, returned from England, with a press and letters, to set up as a printer at Boston, that Benjamin was finally persuaded to enter into indentures of apprenticeship with him. He did not yield at once, because, while he preferred the business of a printer to that of a tallow chandler, the salt of the sea was still in his blood. Under the provisions of the indentures, he was to serve as his brother's apprentice, until he was twenty-one years of age, but he was to be allowed the wages of a journeyman during the last year of the apprenticeship. It was a fortunate thing for the apprentice that he should have become bound to a master, who had been trained for his craft in London, and the extraordinary skill which he early acquired as a printer was probably due in part to this circumstance. Among the publications printed by James, while the apprenticeship lasted, were Stoddard's _Treatise on Conversion_, Stone's _Short Catechism_ and _A Prefatory Letter about Psalmody_. These publications were all of the kind that Franklin afterwards came to regard as hopelessly dry pemmican. Other publications, printed by James Franklin, during the same time, were various New England sermons, _The Isle of Man, or Legal Proceedings in Manshire against Sin_, an allegory, _A Letter from One in the Country to his Friend in Boston_, _News from the Moon_, _A Friendly Check from a kind Relation to the Chief Cannoneer_ and _A Word of Comfort to a Melancholy Country_--all political pamphlets,--several papers on inoculation, and a production bearing the quaint title _Hooped Petticoats Arraigned by the Light of Nature and the Law of God_. But it was through a publication of a very different nature from these that James Franklin has come to occupy his position of prominence in the life of his apprentice. This publication was the _New England Courant_, already mentioned above. Its first issue appeared at Boston on August 21, 1721, and so bold were its pungent comments upon the clergy and magistrates of the Colony that, within a year, James Franklin was by the Council summoned before it for what it conceived to be highly injurious reflections upon the civil authorities. The reflections consisted in this: A letter from Newport in the _Courant_ for