In due time Franklin found himself in the great city of London, where he did not know a single person. He at once showed what stuff he was made of. He quietly went to work at his trade and worked harder than ever. He kept up his studious habits, and spent all his spare time in reading good books.
=256. Returns to Philadelphia; successful as a Printer and Publisher.=--After a stay of a year and a half in London, Franklin returned to Philadelphia, and soon after set up in business for himself as a printer. After a time he started a newspaper. He worked early and late, attending to every detail himself. He was not ashamed to carry material for his paper through the streets on a wheelbarrow.
Once he invited a rival in his business home to dine. Pointing to a loaf of bread from which they had eaten, he said, "Unless you can live cheaper than I, you cannot starve me out."
When he was twenty-four the prosperous young printer married Deborah Read, the young woman who had laughed at him years before as he trudged through the streets with the rolls under his arms. Deborah proved herself a real helpmate, thrifty and industrious. Attached to the printing office was a little shop which the young wife tended.
"Our table was plain and simple," says Franklin in his autobiography, "our furniture of the cheapest. For instance, our breakfast was for a long time bread and milk (no tea), and I ate it out of a twopenny earthen porringer, with a pewter spoon." In after years the thrifty couple indulged in some splendor, for in 1765 Mrs. Franklin, in a letter to her husband, alludes proudly to a papered room, horsehair chairs, a sideboard, and three carpets.
=257. His Happy, Useful, and Prosperous Career in Philadelphia.=--For twenty years Franklin lived a prosperous life as an active business man of the good Quaker city. He had become noted for his integrity, sagacity, and prosperity. His newspaper became known for its sparkling and timely editorials. The most intelligent and influential men of the city met in his office to discuss the questions of the day.
The same year that Washington was born (1732) Franklin issued the first number of his _Poor Richard's Almanac_, which soon gained great fame for its wise and pithy sayings. The popularity which this little work maintained for twenty-five years was astonishing. Its shrewd and quaint maxims soon became household words in almost every shop and home of the land.