Multimedia Mania/abacus-multimedia-mania.iso/dp/0152/01525.txt

Text File | 1993-07-27 | 7KB | 125 lines

$Unique_ID{bob01525}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{Sketches, Old And New
The Late Benjamin Franklin}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Twain, Mark}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{franklin
boys
time
day
early

}
$Date{1893}
$Log{}
Title:       Sketches, Old And New
Book:        The Late Benjamin Franklin
Author:      Twain, Mark
Date:        1893

The Late Benjamin Franklin

     ["Never put off till to-morrow what you can do day after to-morrow just
as well." - B. F.]

     This party was one of those persons whom they call Philosophers.  He was
twins, being born simultaneously in two different houses in the city of
Boston.  These houses remain unto this day, and have signs upon them worded in
accordance with the facts.  The signs are considered well enough to have,
though not necessary, because the inhabitants point out the two birth-places
to the stranger anyhow, and sometimes as often as several times in the same
day.  The subject to this memoir was of a vicious disposition, and early
prostituted his talents to the invention of maxims and aphorisms calculated to
inflict suffering upon the rising generation of all subsequent ages.  His
simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up far the
emulation of boys for ever - boys who might otherwise have been happy.  It was
in this spirit that he became the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no
other reason than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything
might be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers.
With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all
day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the light of
a smouldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or else
have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.  Not satisfied with these
proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and water, and
studying astronomy at meal time - a thing which has brought affliction to
millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's pernicious
biography.

     His maxims were full of animosity towards boys.  Nowadays a boy cannot
follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those
everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin on the spot.  If he buys two
cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has said, my
son - 'A groat a day's a penny a year;'" and the comfort is all gone out of
those peanuts.  If he wants to spin his top when he has done work, his father
quotes, "Procrastination is the thief of time." If he does a virtuous action,
he never gets anything for it, because "Virtue is its own reward." And that
boy is hounded to death and robbed of his natural rest, because Franklin said
once, in one of his inspired flights of malignity -

     "Early to bed and early to rise
     Makes a man healthy and wealthy and wise."

     As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on
such terms.  The sorrow that that maxim has cost me through my parents'
experimenting on me with it, tongue cannot tell.  The legitimate result is my
present state of general debility, indigence, and mental aberration.  My
parents used to have me up before nine o'clock in the morning, sometimes, when
I was a boy.  If they had let me take my natural rest, where would I have been
now?  Keeping store, no doubt, and respected by all.

     And what an adroit old adventurer the subject of this memoir was!  In
order to get a chance to fly his kite on Sunday he used to hang a key on the
string and let on to be fishing for lightning.  And a guileless public would
go home chirping about the "wisdom" and the "genius" of the hoary
Sabbath-breaker.  If anybody caught him playing "mumble-peg" by himself, after
the age of sixty, he would immediately appear to be ciphering out how the
grass grew - as if it was any of his business.  My grandfather knew him well,
and he says Franklin was always fixed - always ready.  If a body, during his
old age, happened on him unexpectedly when he was catching flies, or making
mud pies, or sliding on a cellar-door, he would immediately look wise, and rip
out a maxim, and walk off with his nose in the air and his cap turned wrong
side before, trying to appear absent- minded and eccentric.  He was a hard
lot.

     He invented a stove that would smoke your head off in four hours by the
clock.  One can see the almost devilish satisfaction he took in it by his
giving it his name.

     He was always proud of telling how he entered Philadelphia for the first
time, with nothing in the world but two shillings in his pocket and four rolls
of bread under his arm.  But really, when you come to examine it critically,
it was nothing.  Anybody could have done it.

     To the subject of this memoir belongs the honor of recommending the army
to go back to bows and arrows in place of bayonets and muskets.  He observed,
with his customary force, that the bayonet was very well under some
circumstances, but that he doubted whether it could be used with accuracy at a
long range.

     Benjamin Franklin did a great many notable things for his country, and
made her young name to be honored in many lands as the mother of such a son.
It is not the idea of this memoir to ignore that or cover it up.  No; the
simple idea of it is to snub those pretentious maxims of his, which he worked
up with a great show of originality out of truisms that had become wearisome
platitudes as early as the dispersion from Babel; and also to snub his stove,
and his military inspirations, his unseemly endeavor to make himself
conspicuous when he entered Philadelphia, and his flying his kite and fooling
away his time in all sorts of such ways when he ought to have been foraging
for soap-fat, or constructing candles.  I merely desired to do away with
somewhat of the prevalent calamitous idea among heads of families that
Franklin acquired his great genius by working for nothing, studying by
moonlight, and getting up in the night instead of waiting till morning like a
Christian; and that this program, rigidly inflicted, will make a Franklin of
every father's fool.  It is time these gentlemen were finding out that these
execrable eccentricities of instinct and conduct are only the evidences of
genius, not the creators of it.  I wish I had been the father of my parents
long enough to make them comprehend this truth, and thus prepare them to let
their son have an easier time of it.  When I was a child I had to boil soap,
notwithstanding my father was wealthy, and I had to get up early and study
geometry at breakfast, and peddle my own poetry, and do everything just as
Franklin did, in the solemn hope that I would be a Franklin some day.  And
here I am.