The next page is thumb-worn and greased by frequent handling; for Uncle BENJAMIN FRANKLIN is a deserved favorite with the family. We should have liked to live with him, or if the house, as was natural, was too full for that, to have made long visits at his mansion. His is a right royal, good face, is it not? He looks as if he was always in love with a whole school of well-behaved, sweet-mannered children, and was about to take out from his capacious pockets, with a sly, benevolent surprise, a large assorted lot of presents. His face beams with a broad, heavenly tranced-ness, as if it had taken toll from his sky-tapping kite, and had become charged with positive celestial electricity. He looks as if he might have been chosen the executor of all the estates in the Union; and as if half the pangs of death were abstracted from those who were to leave their children and property to his honest, wise, and efficient care. He seems like a born trustee for schools, an hereditary director of charities,—one nominated in every village and town to every responsible place, and elected unanimously. In his broadly balanced characteristics there is, too, a latent, reserved force, which makes us fancy that he might, when commissioner to England, in 1774, have paid a visit to Burns in Scotland and suggested to him, as advice to others, those shrewd lines:— “Ay free, aff han’ your story tell, When wi’ a bosom crony; But still keep something to yoursel Ye scarcely tell to ony.” In fact, it is upon this felt reserve of uncommunicated goodness that we anchor our loving trust, feeling that the flukes cannot be uplifted nor our confidence drag. Among the few historical characters that red-mark the past 5873 years of the accepted chronology of our race, Franklin stands among the first half-dozen who reconcile us to public greatness, whose individuality is not obscured, whose virtues are not hazed, whose purity is not flecked anywhere by any soil from the public highways.