He signed the preliminaries, and submitted to the reproach of personal and public ingratitude as he had submitted to the taunts of Wedderburn. History has justified his confidence,--the most careful research having failed to bring to light any confirmation of the suspicions of his colleagues. And Vergennes, though nettled for the moment, understood Franklin's position too well to lay the act at his door as an expression of a real opinion. Much time and long discussions were still required to convert the preliminaries into a final treaty; for the complicated interests of England, France, and Spain were to be taken into the account. But each party longed for peace; each party needed it; and on the 3d of September, 1783, another Treaty of Paris gave once more the short-lived, though precious boon to Europe and America. During Franklin's residence at the Court of France, and mainly through his influence, that court had advanced to Congress three millions of livres a year as a loan, had increased it to four millions in 1781, had the same year added six millions as a free gift to the three millions with which she began, and become security for the regular payment of the interest upon a loan of ten millions to be raised in Holland.[F] Nor will it be inappropriate to add, that, before he sailed upon his mission to France, he called in all the money he could command in specie (between three and four thousand pounds) and put it into the public treasury as a loan,--and that while the young men, Adams and Jay, were provided with competent secretaries of legation, he, though bowed down by age and disease, and with ten times their work to do, was left to his own resources, and, but for the assistance of his grandson, would have been compelled to do it all with his own hand. FOOTNOTES: [D] Franklin's Works, Vol. IX. p. 284, Sparks's edition. [E] I cannot deny myself the pleasure of referring in this connection to Mr. Carey's admirable exposition of this fact in his "Principles of Political Science." [F] In all, eighteen millions as a loan, and nine millions as a free gift. OUR BATTLE-LAUREATE. "How came the Muses to settle in Connecticut?" This was the question of a writer in the "Atlantic Monthly" last February, whose history of the "Pleiades" of that State we read with a pleasure which we doubt not was shared by all who saw it, except perhaps a few who did not relish the familiar way in which the feather duster was whisked about the statuettes of the seven _dii minorum gentium_ who once reigned in Hartford and New Haven. "There still remain inventive machinists, acute money-changers, acutest peddlers; but the seed of the Muses has run out. No more Pleiades at Hartford."