True to His Home: A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin — John Shaqi
True to His Home: A Tale of the Boyhood of FranklinButterworth, Hezekiah
General
True to His Home: A Tale of the Boyhood of Franklin
Butterworth, Hezekiah
Franklin, Benjamin, 1706-1790 -- Fiction
"Well, live that she may always speak well of you," said Uncle Benjamin;
"so that she may speak well of you when you two shall meet for the last
time."
"Uncle," said Jenny, "why do you always have something solemn to say?
Ben isn't solemn, is he?"
"No, my girl, your brother Ben is a very lively boy. You will have to
hold him back some day, I fear."
"No, no, uncle, I shall always push him on. He likes to go ahead. I like
to see him go--don't you?"
CHAPTER XIII.
THE ELDER FRANKLIN'S STORIES.
PETER FOLGER, Quaker, the grandfather of Benjamin Franklin, was one of
those noblemen of Nature whose heart beat for humanity. He had been
associated in the work of Thomas Mayhew, the Indian Apostle, who was the
son of Thomas Mayhew, Governor of Martha's Vineyard. The younger Mayhew
gathered an Indian church of some hundred or more members, and the
Indians so much loved him that they remained true to him and their
church during Philip's war.
What stories Abiah Franklin could have told, and doubtless did tell, of
her old home at Nantucket!--stories of the true hearts of the pioneers,
of people who loved others more than themselves, and not like the
sea-rovers who at this time were making material for the Pirate's Own
Book.
Josiah, too, had his stories of Old England and the conventicles, heroic
tales of the beginning of the long struggle for freedom of opinion. Hard
and rough were the stories of the Commonwealth, of Cromwell, Pym, and
Sir Henry Vane, the younger.
There was one very pleasing old tale that haunted Boston at this time,
of the Hebrew parable order, or after the manner of the German legend.
Such stories were rare in those days of pirates, Indians, and ghosts,
the latter of whom were supposed to make their homes in their graves and
to come forth in their graveclothes, and to set the hearts of unquiet
souls to beating, and like feet to flying with electrical swiftness
before the days of electricity.
Governor Winthrop--the same who got lost in the Mystic woods, and came
at night to an Indian hut in a tree and climbed into it, and was ordered
out of it at a later hour when the squaw came home--took a very
charitable view of life. He liked to reform wrongdoers by changing their
hearts. Out of his large love for every one came this story of old
Boston days.
We will listen to it by the Franklin fire in the candle shop. It was an
early winter tale, and it will be a good warm place to hear it there.
"It is a cold night," said Josiah, "and Heaven pity those without fuel
on a night like this! There are not overmany like Governor Winthrop in
the world."
Abiah drew her chair up nearer to the great fire, for it made one chilly
to hear the beginning of that story, but the end of it made the heart
warm.
"It was in the early days of the colony," said Josiah, "and the woods in
the winter were bare, and the fields were cold. There was a lack of wood
on the Mystic near the town.
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