called an _Essay to do Good_, which"--did what, sir? For I am now going to give you, in Franklin's own words (they carry with them the justification of every dollar expended in raising these walls), the original secret of his illustrious career--what was the effect produced by reading these two little books of Defoe and Cotton Mather? "they perhaps gave me a turn of thinking, which had an influence on some of the principal future events of my life." Yes, sir, in the reading of those books was the acorn that sprouted into that magnificent oak; there was the fountain-drop which a fairy might have sipped from a buttercup, from which has flowed the Missouri and the Mississippi,--the broad, deep river of Franklin's fame, winding its way through the lapse of ages, and destined to flow on, till it shall be ingulfed in the ocean of eternity. From his "infancy," sir, "passionately fond of reading," nay, with the appetite of a vulture, with the digestion of an ostrich, attacking the great folios of polemic divinity in his father's library. Not a dull boy, either; not a precocious little bookworm; fond of play; doesn't dislike a little mischief; sometimes, as he tells us, "led the other boys into scrapes;" but in his intervals of play, in his leisure moments, up in the lonely garret when the rest of the family were asleep, holding converse in his childhood with the grave old non-conformists, Howe and Owen and Flavel and Baxter,--communing with the austerest lords of thought; the demigods of puritanism. Franklin not a book-man? Why, he goes on to tell us that it was "this bookish inclination which at length determined his father to make him a printer," against his own inclination, which was for the sea; and when he had thus by constraint become a printer, his great consolation was, as he says, that "I now had access to better books. An acquaintance with the apprentices of booksellers enabled me sometimes to borrow a small one, which I was careful to return soon and clean. Often I sat up in my chamber reading the greatest part of the night, when the book was borrowed in the evening and was to be returned in the morning, lest it should be found missing."