"I determined to give a week's strict attention to each of the virtues successively. Thus, in the first week my great guard was to avoid every the least offence against _Temperance_, leaving the other virtues to their ordinary chance, only marking every evening the faults of the day. Thus, if in the first week I could keep my first line, marked T, clear of spots, I supposed the habit of that virtue so much strengthened, and its opposite weakened, that I might venture extending my attention to include the next, and for the following week keep both lines clear of spots. Proceeding thus to the last, I could go through a course complete in thirteen weeks, and four courses in a year. And like him who having a garden to weed does not attempt to eradicate all the bad herbs at once, which would exceed his reach and his strength, but works on one of the beds at a time, and, having accomplished the first, proceeds to the second, so I should have, I hoped, the encouraging pleasure of seeing on my pages the progress I made in virtue, by clearing successively my lines of their spots, till in the end, by a number of courses, I should be happy in viewing a clean book, after a thirteen weeks' daily examination." Uncle Fritz said that this plan of Franklin's had been quite a favorite plan of different people at the end of the last century. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and Mr. Day, and a good many of the other reformers in England, and many in France, really thought that if people only knew what was right they would all begin and do it. They had to learn, by their own experience or somebody's, that the difficulty was generally deeper down. There was a man, named Droz, who published a little book called "The Art of being Happy," with tables on which every night you were to mark yourself, as a school-mistress marks scholars at school, 10 for truth, 3 for temper, 5 for industry, 9 for frugality, and so on.[7] "But in the long run," said Uncle Fritz, "there may be too much self-examination. If you really look up and not down, and look forward and not back, and loyally lend a hand, why, you can afford to look out and not in, in general." Fergus brought the talk back to the lightning-rod, and asked where was the earliest hint of it. The history seems to be this. In the year 1747 a gentleman named Collinson sent to Franklin, from England or Scotland, one of the glass tubes with which people were then trying electrical experiments. Franklin was very much interested. He went on repeating the experiments which had been made in England and on the Continent of Europe. With his general love of society in such things, he had other glass tubes made, and gave them to his friends.