We never think of Franklin in his youth. We picture him according to the Duplessis (dew-ples′-see) portrait painted in Paris when he was seventy-two; or, according to the old prints that show him wearing the familiar old fur cap and the heavy-rimmed spectacles. Franklin was rather tall (about five feet ten inches), corpulent and heavy, with rounded shoulders. He was a good swimmer; he was muscular and strong, and he was a believer in vegetarianism and air-baths. In late years he suffered from gout in his foot, and wrote in Paris a humorous dialogue from which we get a very good idea of the old gentleman’s habits and tastes. On his appeal to Gout to spare him, his persecutor exclaims: “Not a jot; your rhetoric and your politeness are thrown away; your apology avails nothing. If your situation in life is a sedentary one, your amusements, your recreations, at least, should be active. You ought to walk or ride; or, if the weather prevents that, play at billiards. But let us examine your course of life. While the mornings are long and you have leisure to go abroad, what do you do? Why, instead of gaining an appetite for breakfast by salutary exercise, you amuse yourself with books, pamphlets, or newspapers, which commonly are not worth the reading. Yet you eat an inordinate breakfast, four dishes of tea with cream, and one or two buttered toasts, with slices of hung beef, which I fancy are not things the most easily digested. Immediately afterwards you sit down to write at your desk, or converse with persons who apply to you on business. Thus the time passes till one, without any kind of bodily exercise. But all this I could pardon, in regard, as you say, to your sedentary condition. But what is your practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful garden of those friends with whom you have dined, would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours!” But notwithstanding his sedentary life and his gout and his other maladies, Franklin lived to be eighty-four, preserving his extraordinary brightness and gayety to the last. His mental faculties were unimpaired, his face was fresh and serene, and his spirits were buoyant. This charming vivacity and this play and sparkle of mind greatly contributed towards making Franklin so beloved of the French. His life in Paris was the happiest of his whole career. He was very social, and he therefore enjoyed the Parisian garden parties and dinners, the attractive women, and the literary, scientific and philosophical men. He left France with reluctance, saying he could never forget the years of happiness that he had spent “in the sweet society of a people whose conversation is instructive, whose manners are highly pleasing, and who, above all the nations in the world, have, in the greatest perfection, the art of making themselves beloved by strangers.”