His father being a poor soap-and-candle maker, with a dozen children or more to support or assist, and Benjamin being a printer's apprentice, he was more and more puzzled to gratify his love of knowledge. But one day he hit upon an expedient that brought in a little cash. By reading a vegetarian book this hard, calculating Yankee lad had been led to think that people could live better without meat than with it, and that killing innocent animals for food was cruel and wicked. So he abstained from meat altogether for about two years. As this led to some inconvenience at his boarding-house, he made this cunning proposition to his master: "Give me one-half the money you pay for my board and I will board myself." The master consenting, the apprentice lived entirely on such things as hominy, bread, rice, and potatoes, and found that he could actually live upon half of the half. What did the calculating wretch do with the money? Put it into his money-box? No; he laid it out in the improvement of his mind. When at the age of seventeen, he landed in Philadelphia, a runaway apprentice, he had one silver dollar and one shilling in copper coin. It was a fine Sunday morning, as probably the reader remembers, and he knew not a soul in the place. He asked the boatmen upon whose boat he had come down the Delaware how much he had to pay. They answered, Nothing, because he had helped them row. Franklin, however, insisted upon their taking his shilling's worth of coppers, and forced the money upon them. An hour after, having bought three rolls for his breakfast, he ate one and gave the other two to a poor woman and her child who had been his fellow-passengers. These were small things, you may say; but remember he was a poor, ragged, dirty runaway in a strange town, four hundred miles from a friend, with three pence gone out of the only dollar he had in the world. Next year when he went home to see his parents, with his pocket full of money, a new suit of clothes and a watch, one of his oldest Boston friends was so much pleased with Franklin's account of Philadelphia that he determined to go back with him. On the journey Franklin discovered that his friend had become a slave to drink. He was sorely plagued and disgraced by him, and at last the young drunkard had spent all his money and had no way of getting on except by Franklin's aid. This hard, calculating, mercenary youth, did he seize the chance of shaking off a most troublesome and injurious traveling companion? Strange to relate, he stuck to his old friend, shared his purse with him till it was empty, and then began on some money which he had been intrusted with for another, and so got him to Philadelphia, where he still assisted him. It was seven years before Franklin was able to pay all the debt incurred by him to aid this old friend, for abandoning whom few would have blamed him.