THE MAN FRANKLIN.--Benjamin Franklin was born at Boston, Mass., Jan. 17th, 1706. His father was a chandler, a trade not now known by that term, meaning a maker of soaps and candles. Benjamin was the fifteenth of a family of seventeen children. He was so much of the same material with other boys that it was his notion to go to sea, and to keep him from doing so he was apprenticed to his brother, who was a printer. To be apprenticed then was to be absolutely indentured; to belong to the master for a term of years. Strangely enough, the boy who wanted to be a sailor was a reader and student, captivated by the style of the _Spectator_, a model he assiduously cultivated in his own extensive writings afterwards. He was not assisted in his studies, and all he ever knew of mathematics he taught himself. Being addicted to literature by natural proclivity he inserted his own articles in his brother's newspaper, and these being very favorably commented upon by the local public, or at least noticed and talked about, his authorship of them was discovered, and this led to a quarrel between the two brothers. Nevertheless, when James, the elder brother, was imprisoned for alleged seditious articles printed by him, the paper was for a time issued in young Benjamin's name. But the quarrel continued, the boy was imposed upon by his master, and brother, as naturally as might have been expected under the circumstances of the younger having the monopoly of all the intellectual ability that existed between the two, and in 1723, being then only seventeen, he broke his indentures, a heinous offense in those times, and ran away, first to New York and then to Philadelphia, where he found employment as a journeyman printer. He had attained a skill in the business not usual at the time.