"THOSE PAMPHLETS."
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN loved to meet Samuel Franklin, Uncle Benjamin's son,
who also had caught the gentle philosopher's spirit, and was making good
his father's intention. Samuel was a thrifty man in a growing town.
"It is the joy of my life to find you so prosperous," said Franklin,
"for it would have made your father's heart happy could he have known
that one day I would find you so. Samuel, your father was a good man. I
shall never cease to be grateful for his influence over me when I was a
boy. He was my schoolmaster."
"Yes, my father was a good man, and I never saw it as I do now. I was
not all to him that I ought to have been. He was a poor man; he lived as
it were on ideas, and people were accustomed to look upon him as a man
who had failed in life."
"He will never fail while you are a man of right influence," said
Franklin. "He lives in you."
"I feel his influence more and more every day," said Samuel.
"Samuel Franklin, I do. Success does not consist in popularity or
money-making. Right influence is success in life. I have been an
unworthy godson of your father, but I am more than ever determined to
carry out the principles that he taught me; they are the only things
that will stand in life; as for the rest, the grave swallows all. Your
father's life shall never be a failure if my life can bring to it honor.
"Samuel, I have not always done my best, but I resolve more and more to
be worthy of the love of all men when I think of what a character your
father developed. He thought of himself last. He did not die poor. His
hands were empty, but not his heart, and there sleeps no richer man in
the Granary burying ground than he.
"Samuel, he parted with his library containing the notes of his best
thoughts in life in his efforts to come to America to give me the true
lessons in life because I bore his name. It was a brotherly thought
indeed that led my father who loved him to name me for him."
"You speak of his library--his collection of religious books and
pamphlets, which he wrote over with his own ideas; you have touched a
tender spot in my heart. He wanted that I should have those pamphlets,
and that I should try to recover them through some London agent. You are
going to London. Do you think that they could be recovered after so many
years?"
"Samuel, there is a strange thing that I have observed. It is this: When
a man looks earnestly for a thing that some one has desired him to have,
his mind is curiously influenced and has strange directions. It is like
blindfolded children playing hot and cold. There is some strange
instinct in one who seeks a hidden object for his own or others' good
that leads his feet into mysterious ways. I have much faith in that
hidden law. Samuel, I may be able to find those pamphlets; I thought of
them when I was in London. If I do, I will buy them at whatever cost,
and will bring them to you, and may both of us try to honor the name of
that loving, forgiving, noble man until we see each other again. It may
be that when I shall come here another time, if I do, I will bring with
me the pamphlets."
"If you were to find them, I would indeed believe in a special
Providence."
The two parted. Poor Uncle Benjamin had sold his books for money, but
was his life a failure, or was he never living more nobly than now?
Franklin went to the Granary burying ground, where the old man slept.
Great elms stood before the place. He thought of what his parents had
been, how they had struggled and toiled, and how glad they were that
Uncle Benjamin had come to them for his sake. He resolved to erect a
monument there.
He recalled Uncle Benjamin's teaching, that a man rises by overcoming
his defects, and so gains strength.
He had tried to profit by the old man's lesson in answer to his own
question, "Have I a chance?"
He had not only struggled to make strong his conscious weaknesses of
character, but those of his mental power as well.
His old pedagogue, Mr. Brownell, had been unable to teach him
mathematics. In this branch of elementary studies he had proved a
failure and a dunce. But he had struggled against this defect of Nature,
as against all others, with success.
He was going to London as the agent of the colonies. He would carry
back to England those principles that the old man had taught him, and
would live them there. His Uncle Benjamin had written those principles
in his "pamphlets," and again in his own life. Would he ever see these
documents which had in fact been his schoolbooks, but which had come to
him without the letter, because the old man had been too poor to keep
the books?