5
Two months later Franklin gained independence of another sort—even if many persons taking the same step have interpreted it as just the opposite. In September 1730 Ben Franklin married. Love’s pathways are rarely straight; in the case of Franklin and Deborah Read they were more crooked than usual. He lost her once by his distraction and neglect while he was in London. Tired of waiting, she married another, a potter named John Rogers. Rogers was a competent ceramicist but rather loose with promises to pay—and, as rumors that
succeeded the wedding suggested, loose with other promises as well. Someone heard from someone else who knew secondhand that Rogers already had a wife, abandoned in England. Needless to say, this upset Debbie considerably. Rogers must have been a charming fellow to cause both Debbie and the vigilant Sarah to overlook his lack of references; almost certainly heartache accompanied the embarrassment Debbie felt at falling for someone so unworthy. Beyond the bigamy, his free spending threatened them both with debts that could not be paid. Debbie, disgusted, left him and returned to her mother’s house, where she refused to have anything to do with men or most women either.
Not surprisingly, it was with mixed feelings that she subsequently learned that he had left Philadelphia for the West Indies. No one knew when he would return, or whether. Was he doing to her what he had done to his first wife? (Was that other woman even the first?) His creditors wanted to know, even if Debbie, who wished him good riddance, did not.
Yet the uncertainty of his whereabouts, combined with the importunities of his creditors, left Debbie in a more tenuous position than ever. If Rogers indeed still had a wife in England, then Debbie would have no difficulty getting her marriage annulled, freeing her from his debts and likewise liberating her to enter another marriage, should the occasion arise. But no one knew where this said first wife lived, and Debbie and Sarah certainly lacked the resources to conduct an investigation to confirm her existence. If the first wife did not exist, Debbie was stuck with Rogers, for Pennsylvania law did not allow divorce for mere desertion. The situation grew only more complicated when unconfirmable reports arrived from the Caribbean that Rogers had died. With no body or death certificate, Debbie would have to wait years for legal release from a union that may have been illegal from the start.
Franklin carried some of Debbie’s misfortune upon his own conscience. At least so he said in his autobiography, written four decades after the fact. “I considered my giddiness and inconstancy when in London as in a great degree the cause of her unhappiness.” This was the noble pose for the world-famous man; it was also rather self-centered. As noted, such guilt as Franklin felt about Debbie at the time of which he spoke was slow to surface. This is hardly surprising in a young man with much on his mind, however poorly it matched the persona the older Franklin projected back onto his past.
Whatever portion guilt played in his thinking, Franklin decided to resume his courtship of Debbie. His primary reasons were far from romantic. A journeyman printer might sow wild oats with little care for the opinion of others, and Franklin, by his own admission and by subsequent undeniable evidence, had continued to do so upon his return from London. “That hard-to-be-governed passion of youth had hurried me frequently into intrigues with low women that fell in my way.” But a man of business, one who hoped to win the approval of the respectable element of Philadelphia, could hardly continue such illicit liaisons. Besides, money was tight and time tighter in the new business, and these liaisons “were attended with some expence and great inconvenience”—not to mention “a continual risque to my health by a distemper which of all things I dreaded, though by great good luck I escaped it.” Unwilling to press his luck further, or to offend propriety any longer, Franklin determined to wed.
Debbie Read was not his first choice. A young man with promise might expect a dowry as accompaniment to his bride, and Franklin, judging his promise to be as bright as that of anyone else in the city, chose to test the marriage market. His housemate and fellow Juntoist, Thomas Godfrey, and especially Godfrey’s wife encouraged a courtship between Franklin and the daughter of one of Mrs. Godfrey’s relatives. Franklin took the encouragement and initiated the suit. As the matter grew more serious, Mrs. Godfrey inquired as to what Franklin would need in the way of a dowry. Franklin, feeling quite full of himself, said he would like to retire his debt in the print shop, at that time somewhat less than £100. When Mrs. Godfrey responded that the girl’s parents had no such sum on hand, he suggested that they mortgage their house.
After some research the parents rejected Franklin’s terms. The printing business, they said, was not so profitable as Franklin supposed—certainly not so profitable that they would risk their house to marry their daughter to a printer who had yet to prove himself. Rather than make a counteroffer, they abruptly broke off relations, shutting up their daughter and forbidding Franklin to see her.
Franklin was shocked. Reasonable and honest people would have met him halfway; these parents, he suspected, having lured him into a relationship with their daughter, now hoped to exploit the strength of his feelings for her by provoking him to elope with her—in the event of which they would have to supply no dowry whatsoever. He resolved to have nothing to do with them. His suspicions seemed confirmed when, sometime later, the parents—evidently judging that their bluff had been called—indicated they would be willing to entertain his suit once more. Franklin stood on his pride, repeating that he would have nothing to do with that family. In his anger he managed to alienate the Godfreys, who packed their belongings and left his house. Subsequently Thomas Godfrey left the Junto as well. (Franklin gave another reason for Godfrey’s withdrawal from the discussion club: “He knew little out of his way, and was not a pleasing companion, as like most great mathematicians I have met with, he expected unusual precision in every thing said, or was forever denying or distinguishing upon trifles, to the disturbance of all conversation.”)
Yet as Franklin’s anger cooled and he surveyed the situation further, he discovered that the opinion that printing was an unpromising trade was hardly unique to the Godfrey’s relations. He might get a dowry, but only attached to an unattractive or otherwise disagreeable woman. Practical though he was, he was not so calculating as to consign himself to life with a woman he did not desire nor think he could learn to love.
So he settled for Debbie Read. She was happy to see him again, if only because he appeared her one escape from the predicament into which she had fallen. Sarah Read likewise approved the suit, for similar reasons.
But the complications of Debbie’s predicament seemed almost overwhelming. If John Rogers really was dead, Franklin might inherit his debts along with his wife. If alive, he might return and charge Franklin and Debbie with bigamy. The same mores that prevented Debbie’s divorce took an even sterner view of bigamy. Upon conviction both parties might receive thirty-nine strokes of the lash upon their bare backs, followed by life imprisonment at hard labor.
These perils persuaded the prospective newlyweds to postpone their union many months. But with each turn of the calendar leaf the likelihood of Rogers’s reappearance diminished, and in the summer of 1730 Franklin and Debbie decided to go through with their plan. Yet even then they adopted an expedient: rather than celebrate a formal wedding, they simply set up housekeeping as husband and wife. This kind of common-law arrangement had evolved for precisely such ambiguous situations; the official sanction it bestowed on relationships grew out of their durability and demonstrated success. Franklin had no relatives nearby to raise objections to such an irregular, if not exactly unusual, approach to marriage. Debbie’s relations understood her plight and recognized this as the best, perhaps only, remedy. From September 1, 1730, they presented themselves to a largely approving community as husband and wife.
The marriage was tested almost at once, in a manner many wives would have found unendurable. Sometime in late 1730 or early 1731 a son was born to Benjamin Franklin by a woman other than Deborah Read Franklin.
The timing of events suggests that Franklin already knew, when he and Debbie decided to marry, that his child was on the way. He would have been unthinkably imprudent not to tell her of such a significant impending occurrence. Perhaps he also knew at that time that he, rather than the child’s mother, would take charge of the infant; perhaps not. If he did know, he must have obtained Debbie’s consent, since she would be the child’s stepmother and, in light of contemporary customs and Franklin’s heavy workload, primary caretaker. If he did not know ahead of the birth that he would assume custody of the child, Debbie’s consent must have been obtained after the fact—a circumstance fraught with potential for anger and resentment.
The identity of the mother of Franklin’s son has been a mystery for nearly three centuries. Because there evidently was no question as to Franklin’s paternity, she must not have been a prostitute or someone otherwise particularly promiscuous (at least not around the time of conception). Debbie must have known who she was—as Franklin’s fiancée and then wife she certainly would have asked if she did not know already. Therefore Sarah must have known also. Doubtless some other people close to Franklin or Debbie must have wondered where this child came from; the nosiest would have pried the secret out. Some authors have suggested that the boy—named William—was actually Debbie’s child, conceived before her marriage to Franklin. By this argument the refusal of the couple to acknowledge her maternity reflected their continuing concern that John Rogers might return and that one or both of them would be charged with bigamy or adultery. Though the child could not well be hidden, the mother might be, shielding all concerned from the harshest consequences.
The initial reasonableness of this argument fails upon the protracted, and finally permanent, absence of Rogers. Even after the passage of years precluded any further concerns about Rogers, Debbie declined to claim William as her own—an omission impossible to imagine in any mother, let alone one who had to watch from close at hand while her son spent his life labeled a bastard. Besides, Franklin’s friends all assumed that Debbie was not the mother. “’tis generally known here his birth is illegitimate and his mother not in good circumstances,” wrote George Roberts, albeit thirty years after the fact. Apparently Franklin had a financial arrangement of sorts with the mother, who was content to remain anonymous. “I understand some small provision is made by him for her,” Roberts said, “but her being one of the most agreeable of women prevents particular notice being shown, or the father and son acknowledging any connection with her.”
(In the 1760s one of Franklin’s political rivals anonymously put out that William’s mother was a woman servant named Barbara, who worked in the Franklin household for years, at £10 per annum, until her recent death. There is no reason to credit the story and much to discredit it, starting with the fact that it boggles the mind to think that Deborah would have tolerated the continuing presence of her husband’s former paramour. William she could not turn out, though she was frequently tempted; “Barbara” she could have, and certainly would have.)
By all evidence, marriage to Debbie settled Franklin down. This, of course, was much of the point of the match from his perspective, but Debbie could have been forgiven for wondering. For several years his passion had ruled him, with little William being only the most obvious evidence. Whether Franklin could rule his passion remained to be seen. Debbie must have kept close watch.
In the second year of their marriage she discovered, doubtless to her joy and satisfaction, and likely to his joy and relief, that she was pregnant. No longer would that other woman’s brat be the only child in the house; this new child would bond Ben to her in a way mere (common-law) marriage could not. On October 20, 1732, Francis Folger Franklin was born. Debbie may have chosen the boy’s Christian name, since obviously Ben selected his own mother’s family name as the baby’s middle name. Sarah, who had joined her daughter and son-in-law in the house on Market Street that served as both domicile and workplace, assisted in the delivery and in the care of the newborn. In addition, Sarah almost certainly tended to little William while Debbie nursed and otherwise doted on Franky. Downstairs, Ben hoped for an extrapolation of Debbie’s maternal good feelings from Franky to William.
Marriage and the birth of two sons, coming after the establishment of his own printing business, fairly well rooted Franklin in Philadelphia. Much of his life to this point had been a search for a place that suited his temperament and talents. Boston was too confining, London too loose. Eventually Philadelphia would grow too small for him—or rather he would grow too large for Philadelphia. But during the three decades that spanned his twenties, thirties, and forties, Philadelphia provided a congenial home.
Of course, the congeniality was as much Franklin’s doing as Philadelphia’s. His founding of the Junto was a first step in this direction. The club allowed Franklin to surround himself with individuals of similar intellectual interests; in time, as the members of the group assumed positions of leadership in the city, its influence leavened the community as a whole.
A second step was the organizing of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Private libraries were common enough among men of wealth in the colonies; Franklin had taken advantage of a few himself. Nor were institutional libraries unheard of; these were usually joined to churches or other bodies heavenly bent. A secular subscription library, however, was something new. Subscribers would pool their resources to buy books all would share and from which all might benefit. Franklin floated the idea in the Junto; upon favorable reception he drew up a charter specifying an initiation fee of forty shillings and annual dues of ten shillings. The charter was signed in July 1731, to take effect upon the collection of fifty subscriptions.
Franklin led the effort to obtain the subscriptions. At first, in doing so, he presented the library as his own idea, as indeed it was. But he encountered a certain resistance on the part of potential subscribers, a subtle yet unmistakable disinclination in some people to give credit by their participation to one so openly civic-minded. They asked themselves, if they did not ask him, what was in this for Ben Franklin that made him so eager to promote the public weal. To allay their suspicions, Franklin resorted to a subterfuge. “I therefore put myself as much as I could out of sight, and stated it as a scheme of a number of friends, who had requested me to go about and propose it to such as they thought lovers of reading.”
Within four months the Library Company had its requisite two score and ten commitments. Compiling the initial book order involved identifying favorite titles and consulting James Logan, the most learned man in Pennsylvania. Logan knew Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and Italian and was said to be the only person in America sufficiently conversant with mathematics to be able to comprehend Newton’s great Principia Mathematica. Before Franklin’s emergence, Logan—who was thirty years the elder and had been the personal protégé of William Penn—was the leading figure of Pennsylvania letters (and numbers). Naturally Franklin cultivated him as source of advice, patronage, and civic goodwill. Logan listed several items essential to the education of any self-respecting person; between these and the titles Franklin and the other library directors chose on their own, early purchases covered topics ranging from geometry to journalism, natural philosophy to metaphysics, poetry to gardening.
Louis Timothée, a journeyman in Franklin’s shop, was hired as librarian, and a room to house the collection was rented. Franklin and the other directors of the library instructed Timothée to open the room from two till three on Wednesday afternoons and from ten till four on Saturdays. Any “civil gentlemen” might peruse the books, but only subscribers could borrow them. (Exception was made for James Logan, in gratitude for his advice in creating the collection.) Borrowers might have one book at a time. Upon accepting a volume each borrower must sign a promissory note covering the cost of the book. This would be voided upon return of the book undamaged. The borrower might then take out another, building his edifice of knowledge, as it were, one brick at a time.
Franklin was twenty-seven when the Library Company was founded, twenty-eight by the time the first shipment of books arrived from London. Colonial life was noteworthy for the opportunities it afforded able and ambitious young men, but few took such advantage of these opportunities as Franklin—not least since none were more able and not many more ambitious. The skeptics on the subject of the library were right to wonder what Franklin stood to gain from the project; he expected to gain from everything he did. But his gain, as he interpreted it, would be the community’s gain, and the community’s gain his.
In February 1731 Franklin became a Freemason. Shortly thereafter he volunteered to draft bylaws for the embryonic local chapter, named for St. John the Baptist; upon acceptance of the bylaws he was elected warden and subsequently grand master of the lodge. Within three years he became grand master of all of Pennsylvania’s Masons. Not unforeseeably—indeed, this was much of the purpose of membership for everyone involved—his fellow Masons sent business Franklin’s way. In 1734 he printed the Constitutions,the first formally sponsored Masonic book in America; he derived additional work from his brethren on an un-sponsored basis.
Masonic connections may have been behind Franklin’s success in winning work from the provincial government. On the other hand, when the Assembly selected him to print the colony’s paper money, the legislators may simply have based their decision on the quality of his product—as demonstrated, on this topic, by the New Jersey notes he had printed while with Keimer. Success bred success; soon he became the official printer to the Assembly. This provided the print shop with steady work and a predictable income, which in turn allowed Franklin to expand his other activities. The stationery store was enlarged; under Debbie and Sarah’s supervision new items were ordered and new business solicited. Franklin sent one of his journeymen, Thomas Whitmarsh, to South Carolina to open a print shop there after the South Carolina assembly offered a bounty for a printer. Following Whitmarsh’s death of yellow fever in September 1733, Franklin dispatched Louis Timothée to replace him, presumably with a warning about staying clear of low-lying areas during hot weather.
Meanwhile the Pennsylvania Gazette grew into the leading paper of the province. It printed news of Philadelphia and the rest of the province, gleaned from official notices, Franklin’s conversations with persons of high station and low, and sundry other sources. It reprinted articles and notices from papers elsewhere in America and from those London papers and magazines that found their way across the Atlantic.
It also published opinion. Some journalists enter their profession from a zeal to right wrong and oppose entrenched authority; this was what had motivated Franklin’s brother James—and landed James in jail. Ben Franklin certainly learned from James’s experience and from his own experience on James’s paper. He had no desire to publish from prison, and even less desire to not publish from prison or anywhere else. Journalism for him was a business rather than a calling, or perhaps it was a calling that could call only so long as the business beneath it flourished. Unlike James, Ben Franklin would not provoke the authorities into closing him down. If nothing else, such rashness would lose him his printing contract with the provincial government.
In another person such an attitude might have seemed opportunistic, even cynical. Although Franklin was not cynical, it is true that few opportunities escaped him. Yet his attitude toward journalism honestly reflected his personality, to wit, his innate skepticism. No argument ever so convinced him as to preclude his entertaining the opposite. Many people find uncertainty unsettling and insist on definite answers to the large and small questions of life. Franklin was just the opposite, being of that less numerous tribe that finds certainty—or certitude, rather—unsettling. Doubtless this reflected, at least in part, his experience of the stifling certitude of the Mathers in Boston. It also reflected his wide, and ever-widening, reading, which exposed him to multiple viewpoints. Above all, it probably reflected something innate: an equipoise that nearly everyone who knew him noticed and that many remarked upon. It could make him seem smug or shallow; while others agonized upon life’s deep issues, Franklin contented himself with incomplete answers, maintaining an open mind and seeming to skate upon life’s surface.
In short, Franklin possessed the ideal temperament for a newspaper editor who hoped to make money, rather than win converts. He opened the columns of the Gazette to opinions of all kinds, thereby attracting readers of all kinds and allowing the paper to thrive.
Occasionally his broad-mindedness brought him trouble. An outbreak of criticism prompted him to explain his philosophy in an “Apology for Printers,” published in the Gazette in June 1731. The apology began with a subapology for not crafting his case better, but “I have not yet leisure to write such a thing in the proper form, and can only in a loose manner throw those considerations together which should have been the substance of it.”
Franklin was being modest, if not coy. In fact a single sentence summarized his case and that of printers everywhere, while adding the characteristic twist that readers would learn to expect of him. “Printers are educated in the belief that when men differ in opinion both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public; and that when truth and error have fair play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter: Hence they cheerfully serve all contending writers that pay them well, without regarding on which side they are of the question in dispute.”
As usual with Franklin, the twist wound to the heart of the argument. Readers needed to remember that printing was a business, not that different from any other. Smiths dealt in iron, cobblers in leather, printers in opinions. Yet this was what got the printers in trouble. “Hence arises the peculiar unhappiness of that business, which other callings are no way liable to; they who follow printing being scarce able to do any thing in their way of getting a living which shall not probably give offence to some, and perhaps to many, whereas the smith, the shoemaker, the carpenter, or the man of any other trade may work indifferently for people of all persuasions without offending any of them; and the merchant may buy and sell with Jews, Turks, heretics and infidels of all sorts, and get money by every one of them, without giving offence to the most orthodox.” If other tradesmen were required to vouch for the convictions of their customers, there would be little trade transacted. So with printers. “If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed.”
Franklin remarked that in fact much presented to him did not find its way into his paper. Here he cited a couplet from one of the more forgettable books the Junto had recently received from London:
Poets lose half the praise they would have got
Were it but known what they discreetly blot.
He regularly refused anything that might promote vice or other immorality; likewise letters and articles that might do real injury to individuals.
Occasionally something slipped through—as with that which occasioned this defense of printers. Franklin had published an advertisement of a ship about to sail for Barbados; appended to the notice was an N.B.: “No Sea Hens nor Black Gowns will be admitted on any terms.” Franklin, busy as usual, paid little attention to the wording of what, in any event, was obviously someone else’s copy. “I printed it, and received my money, and the advertisement was stuck up round the town as usual.”
At once Franklin found himself excoriated for malice against the clergy and religion. “Black gowns” was an unmistakable reference to priests of the Church of England; sea hens were raucous birds with whom no decent person would wish to be associated.
Franklin conceded error in printing the line. He knew what “black gowns” referred to, although he said he had never encountered “sea hens” before. Could he do the thing over, he would refuse to print the notice. “However, ’tis done and cannot be revoked.” In his defense he adduced some mitigating factors: that he harbored no ill will toward those allegedly slandered, and in fact claimed customers and friends among the Anglican clergy; that he had printed more than a thousand advertisements since opening shop, and this was the first that had given such offense; that if he had intended injury against the clergy, this was an exceedingly foolish way to accomplish it, as the backlash demonstrated; and—not incidentally—“that I got five shillings by it” and “that none who are angry with me would have given me so much to let it alone.”
He recited a fable illustrating his predicament:
A certain well-meaning man and his son were travelling towards a market town, with an ass which they had to sell. The road was bad, and the old man therefore rid [rode], but the son went afoot. The first passenger they met asked the father if he was not ashamed to ride by himself and suffer the poor lad to wade along through the mire; this induced him to take up his son behind him. He had not travelled far when he met others, who said they were two unmerciful lubbers to get both on the back of that poor ass, in such a deep road. Upon this the old man gets off and let his son ride alone. The next they met called the lad a graceless, rascally young jackanapes to ride in that manner through the dirt while his aged father trudged along on foot; and they said the old man was a fool for suffering it. He then bid his son come down and walk with him, and they travelled on leading the ass by the halter; till they met another company, who called them a couple of senseless blockheads for going both on foot in such a dirty way when they had an empty ass with them, which they might ride upon. The old man could bear no longer. My son, he said, it grieves me much that we cannot please all these people. Let us throw the ass over the next bridge, and be no farther troubled with him.
Franklin noted that should the old man have been seen acting on this resolution, he would have been judged even more the fool for trying to please everyone. “Therefore, though I have a temper almost as complying as his, I intend not to imitate him in this last particular. I consider the variety of humours among men, and despair of pleasing everybody; yet I shall not therefore leave off printing. I shall continue my business. I shall not burn my press and melt my letters.”
Franklin’s slip with the sea hens and the black gowns caused him to be more circumspect but no less energetic in soliciting the business of all and sundry. On the contrary, he reached out in every direction he could imagine. He printed notices in Welsh for his small Welsh readership and in German for the larger German community growing up in Pennsylvania. For the latter group he went so far as to launch an entire newspaper in German. Unfortunately, the combination of Germans and their money had yet to yield the critical mass necessary to sustain a paper, and the Philadelphische Zeitung expired after two issues.
The Gazette advertised a diverse array of goods and services. “A considerable quantity of fresh drugs just imported from London are to be sold in large or small parcels,” announced Samuel Chew and Thomas Bond, who kept a shop on Market Street near the market. “Where also may be had most kinds of chemical and galenical medicines duly and honestly prepared, all at very reasonable prices.” The Davis family proposed to sell “a plantation containing 400 acres of very good land … about 120 acres of cleared land, with a good dwelling house, a large barn and a good orchard, a good meadow ready made, and more may be made; the said tract of land may be made into three settlements.” John Parsons offered “a very good new brick house well finished, thirty foot front, two story high, besides a very large cellar, and garret, a good new brick kitchen, stable, and a large garden.”
The traffic in labor was equally lively. “A boy about four years of age to be bound out till he is twenty-one, and a likely young woman’s time to be disposed of, for between two and three years,” advertised Thomas Parry and Isaac Williams, overseers of the poor for the city of Philadelphia. Franklin, either for himself or for a patron who wished to remain anonymous, offered “a likely servant maid’s time for four years…. She works well at household work, and with her needle.”
Traffic in labor included traffic in slaves. “To be sold by Capt. Palmer, two young likely Negro men, country born, bred up in a farm, and can do all manner of plantation work.” Another ship’s captain, Thomas James, advertised “a young Spanish Indian woman … about 20 years of age, and very fit for all household business.”
In later life Franklin would come to view slavery as a pernicious institution incompatible with justice, humanity, or emerging republican values. But in the 1730s, at a time when slavery existed in all of England’s American colonies, when none but the most radical Quakers considered it exceptional, and when bound labor included large numbers of whites as well as blacks (although the whites were bound for a fixed term rather than life), Franklin’s conscience apparently pained him little on the subject. Even as the Gazette carried advertisements for slaves, he participated in the slave trade himself, quite matter-of-factly. “To be sold: A likely Negro girl, about 14 years of age, bred in the country but fit for either town or country business. Enquire of the printer hereof.” On another occasion he offered “a likely young Negro fellow, about 19 or 20 years of age…. He is very fit for labour, being used to plantation work, and has had the small-pox.” And again: “A very likely Negro woman aged about thirty years who has lived in this city from her childhood and can wash and iron very well, cook victuals, sew, spin on the linen wheel, milk cows, and do all sorts of house-work very well. She has a boy of about two years old, which is to go with her…. And also another very likely boy aged about six years who is the son of the abovesaid woman. He will be sold with his mother, or by himself, as the buyer pleases.”
Other notices were more personal. “Whereas Christiana, the wife of John Rubbel of Lancaster County, hath eloped herself from her said husband, and left five young children at home with their father her said husband, these are to give notice to all manner of people that they give no credit nor trust for any manner of goods to the said Christiana on account or with expectation to make any demand on her said husband for anything she buyeth.” Nathaniel Lamplugh gave similar notice when his wife Abigail ran off: “He will not pay any debts she may contract.”
Masters regularly posted notices of runaway servants. Thomas Mills offered a twenty-shilling reward for “a servant man named John Homer, by trade a shoemaker, of short stature, pale complexion, one of his feet hath been half cut off, and three toes off the other. He had on a light double-breasted coat with light-coloured buttons, and he rode on a small dark bay horse.” Christian Grassholt promised a similar reward for “a Dutch servant man, by trade a tailor, talks little or no English, named Hans Wulf Eisman, no hair, about 22 years old, wears a white cap under his felt-hat, white hatband, an old olive-green duroy coat, one sleeve a little torn, a black cloth waistcoat and breeches, white yarn stockings and dark stockings, square-toed shoes with large brass buckles, coarse linen shirt.”
Sometimes it was the inanimate that got away. “Lost on Tuesday night last, on the road between Marcus Hook and Chester, a pocket book with 30s. money and some notes. The finder is desired to leave the book and notes with the printer hereof, and take the money for his pains.”
Useful or simply curious facts filled the odd column-end. “The small-pox has now quite left this city. The number of those that died here of that distemper is exactly 288 and no more. 64 of the number were Negroes; if these may be valued one with another at £30 per head, the loss to the city in that article is near £2000.” “From Newcastle we hear that on Tuesday the 8th instant, the lightning fell upon a house within a few miles of that place, in which it killed 3 dogs, struck several persons deaf, and split a woman’s nose in a surprizing manner.”
When he took over the Gazette from Samuel Keimer, Franklin had promised entertainment as well as information. The two were hard to tease apart on those slow news days when he retailed the latest gossip.
Sure some unauspicious cross-grained planet, in opposition to Venus, presides over the affairs of love about this time. For we hear that on Tuesday last, a certain C-n-table having made an agreement with a neighboring female, to watch with her that night, she promised to leave a window open for him to come in at; but he going his rounds in the dark, unluckily mistook the window, and got into a room where another woman was in bed, and her husband it seems lying on a couch not far distant. The good woman perceiving presently by the extraordinary fondness of her bedfellow that it could not possibly be her husband, made so much disturbance as to wake the good man; who finding somebody had got into his place without his leave, began to lay about him unmercifully; and ’Twas thought that had not our poor mistaken gallant called out manfully for help (as if he were commanding assistance in the king’s name) and thereby raised the family, he would have stood no more chance for his life between the wife and husband than a captive l[ouse] between two thumb nails.
In the spirit of Silence Dogood and Caelia Shortface, Franklin fabricated letters to the editor. Anthony Afterwit related how his father-in-law had tricked him out of a £200 dowry he had been led to expect, and how his wife, taking after her father, had gulled him into spending the two of them into debt on a lifestyle well beyond their means. Only after his wife had gone to visit relatives had he regained control of himself; he dismissed their maid, sold their fine furniture, traded their ornate clock for an honest hourglass and their pacing mare for a milk cow. He had not yet told her of the changes, however—which was why he was writing to the Gazette. “I expect my Dame home next Friday, and as your paper is taken in at the house where she is, I hope the reading of this will prepare her mind for the above surprizing revolutions.”
Alice Addertongue was of the direct lineage of Busy Body. As her own existence was rather quiet (“I am a young girl of about thirty-five, and live at present with my mother”), she relied for entertainment on the follies of others, which she duly repeated to any who would listen. “By industry and application, I have made myself the center of all the scandal in the province; there is little stirring but I hear of it.” Occasionally she encountered a person of whom no ill was spoken; this she attributed to defective intelligence, which she remedied at once. “If she is a woman, I take the first opportunity to let all her acquaintance know I have heard that one of the handsomest or best men in town has said something in praise either of her beauty, her wit, her virtue, or her good management.” This invariably evoked observations on the faults of the woman in question. “To the same purpose, and with the same success, I cause every man of reputation to be praised before his competitors in love, business, or esteem on account of any particular qualification.” Particular occupations facilitated her task. Politics, for example, brought forth if not the worst in men, at least the worst in what people said about men. Recalling a recent golden moment of scandal, which she had recorded faithfully, she predicted that “whoever peruses my writings after my death may happen to think that during a certain term the people of Pennsylvania chose into all their offices of honour and trust the veriest knaves, fools and rascals in the whole province.” Miss Addertongue urged the editor of the Gazette to do his part in disseminating scandal; she predicted a doubling of subscriptions if he complied. To get him started, she included with her letter no fewer than sixteen items guaranteed to besmirch the reputations of those involved. The editor thanked her for her goodwill but declined to print them.
The most famous of Franklin’s alter egos was Richard Saunders. Had Franklin known what a lasting success Richard Saunders would be, he probably would have chosen the name with greater care, for the confusion that arose in readers’ minds—was this Ben Franklin speaking or Richard Saunders?—was compounded by the existence of a real Richard Saunders, a physician and astrologer who had produced an almanac in London for two decades during the latter part of the seventeenth century. Franklin certainly knew of Saunders; he may have read surviving copies of Saunders’s almanac. Yet even if Saunders’s publication physically escaped him, the success of Saunders’s almanac—and of almanacs generally—did not.
Almanacs had existed in one form or another for several centuries. The word was said to derive from the Spanish-Arabic term al manakh, for “calendar”—although other etymologies were forwarded by imaginative scholars, not excluding the almanac-makers themselves. Samuel Ellsworth, a contemporary of Franklin, solved the mystery once for all, and simultaneously applauded the superlative, but not unlimited, talents of himself and others of his vocation:
As to the abilities requisite for composing an ALMANACK, the obvious etymology of the word is sufficient to convince us that in the opinion of the ancients they must be very extraordinary; ALMANACK, an evident abbreviation of ALL MY KNACK, or ALL MAN’S KNACK, plainly intimating, in the most expressive and laconic manner, that ALMANACK was the ne plus ultra of human genius, that this astonishing art engrossed all the powers and faculties of the mind, to that degree that a man that had a KNACK at this could not have had a KNACK at anything else.
As the more pedestrian Arabic origin suggested, almanacs were constructed around a calendar. Samuel Atkins, who produced an almanac in Pennsylvania half a century before Franklin, explained that on his journeys through the mid-Atlantic provinces he found “the people generally complaining that they scarcely knew how the time passed, nor that they hardly knew the day of rest, or Lord’s day, when it was, for want of a diary, or daybook, which we call an Almanack.”
Calendar-keeping was complicated in Franklin’s era by the confusion that attended the changeover from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian. Catholic Europe had accepted Pope Gregory XIII’s reform in the late sixteenth century, but Protestant Europe, including England, remained behind the times—literally, by about eleven days. The question of when the year started also occasioned confusion: in March, according to the old style, or January, by the new? A person happening upon an antique newspaper bearing such date as “January 6, 1705” needed to know whether this was old style or new, since the difference amounted to nearly a whole year. (Thus Franklin, born January 6, 1705, by the old calendar, was born January 17, 1706, by the new.) Conscientious date-writers solved the problem by the device of “January 6, 1705/6.” Not till 1752 would the British government formally decree the changeover within the British empire.
Beyond mere enumeration of days, almanacs noted fixed holidays and such movable feasts as Easter. They charted the phases of the moon, which constituted essential intelligence for travelers and others in an era before extensive artificial lighting, and the related timing of tides, upon which sailors and fishermen, as well as seafaring travelers, depended. Farmers relied on the almanacs’ identification of likely latest and earliest frosts. Citizens with legal business took note of the court-meeting days.
No one, of that age or later, could deny the influence of the sun and moon on human existence; from this incontrovertible fact it was a small step to the belief that other heavenly bodies also influenced life on earth. Although Newton was demystifying the mechanism of the cosmos, astrology retained a hold over many people who knew no better explanation for myriad misfortunes large and small, for wondrous and mundane delights, and for all those other things that remained inexplicable in a prescientific time. Almanac-makers may have placed more or less importance on planetary conjunctions and transits than almanac readers, who themselves varied greatly in the store they put in such things. But readers expected astrology with their equinoxes and eclipses, and publishers did not disappoint them.
Readers expected other expert information as well. For centuries astrologers had doubled as physicians, and vice versa—the real Richard Saunders being a recent example. Moreover, an age that swallowed the idea of witches hardly choked on a magical connection between the macrocosm of the stars and planets and the microcosm of the liver and bowels. Almanackers made the connection explicit; the “man of signs,” a woodcut or engraving identifying various organs with signs of the zodiac (the two arms with Gemini, the heart with Leo, the bowels with Virgo, and so on), was a standard feature of nearly every almanac. On a more practical plane, almanacs included recipes for poultices, emetics, and potions that ranged from the rankly superstitious to the semiscientific. What a later era would call psychological counseling was included as well; this completed a circle with the astrological element by identifying particular days as good for this activity or bad for that.
Style, naturally, counted. Indeed, it counted for a great deal, since most of the substance of what went into almanacs was common knowledge—or common ignorance, as the case happened to be. The very familiarity of almanacs made them old friends to their readers; to tamper too much with the formula would disappoint—and damage sales. In consequence, such differentiation as took place between almanacs took place within relatively narrow constraints. What an almanacker said often mattered less than how he—or she, in a few cases (including that of James Franklin’s widow and Ben’s sister-in-law, Ann, who took over the printing business upon her husband’s death in 1735)—said it.
In short, almanacs attempted to be all things to all people. One English almanacker summarized the craft:
Wit, learning, order, elegance of phrase,
Health, and the art to lengthen out our days
Philosophy, physic and poesie,
All this, and more, in this book to see.
The best of the almanacs succeeded famously. Sales figures are elusive, but such as survive indicate that in England in the 1660s, total sales averaged about 400,000 annually. Even after the government, remarking the plumpness of this goose, levied a fat tax, sales topped 450,000 a century later. In America, almanac publications outstripped those of all other books combined during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most popular of the American almanacs, produced by Nathaniel Ames, sold between 50,000 and 60,000 per year. A man could get rich by almanacs.
Franklin intended to do just that. He had already been in the business of publishing almanacs, starting with Thomas Godfrey’s Pennsylvania Almanack in 1729 (for 1730) followed by John Jerman’s American Almanack the next year. Either Jerman was hard to please or he liked to keep his printers off balance; he had been with Andrew Bradford before coming to Franklin, and he returned to Bradford in 1732. Godfrey too abandoned Franklin for Bradford that year, perhaps for economic reasons, perhaps as part of the general falling-out between his family and Franklin. Whatever the reasons, Franklin found himself staring at the final months of 1732—prime almanac season—with nothing to offer his customers.
So he decided to write his own. He stole the name of Richard Saunders from the deceased astrologer-doctor. He borrowed—apparently without asking—and adapted the title of an almanac his brother James was publishing at Newport: Poor Robin’s Almanack(itself appropriated from a seventeenth-century almanac published under the same title in London). His format followed any number of other almanacs. His facts were public property or easily deducible therefrom.
What was peculiarly Franklin about Poor Richard was the pushy manner in which he marketed it and the distinctive voice in which its author spoke. “Just Published for 1733,” declared the Gazette on December 28, 1732:
Poor Richard: An Almanack containing the Lunations, Eclipses, Planets’ Motions and Aspects, Weather, Sun and Moon’s Rising and Setting, High Water, &c., besides many pleasant and witty Verses, Jests and Sayings, Author’s Motive of Writing, Prediction of the Death of his friend Mr. Titan Leeds, Moon no Cuckold, Batchelor’s Folly, Parson’s Wine and Baker’s Pudding, Short Visits, Kings and Bears, New Fashions, Game for Kisses, Katherine’s Love, Different Sentiments, Signs of a Tempest, Death a Fisherman, Conjugal Debate, Men and Melons, H. the Prodigal, Breakfast in Bed, Oyster Lawsuit &c.
Gazette readers intrigued enough to buy the bound version (priced at three shillings sixpence per dozen, obviously intended for resale) or the broadsheet edition (two shillings sixpence the dozen) were introduced to Richard Saunders, Philomath—a standard honorific for almanac-makers—by Saunders himself. “Courteous Reader, I might in this place attempt to gain thy favour by declaring that I write almanacks with no other view than the public good; but in this I should not be sincere, and men are nowadays too wise to be deceived by pretenses how specious soever.” Like the printer Franklin apologizing for the advertisement that gave offense to certain customers, Saunders confessed to monetary motives. “The plain truth of the matter is, I am excessive poor, and my wife, good woman, is, I tell her, excessive proud. She cannot bear, she says, to sit spinning in her shift of tow while I do nothing but gaze at the stars, and has threatened to burn all my books and rattling-traps (as she calls my instruments) if I do not make some profitable use of them for the good of my family. The printer has offered me some considerable share of the profits, and I have thus begun to comply with my Dame’s desire.”
Twenty-five years earlier Jonathan Swift, writing as Isaac Bickerstaff, had drawn attention to his own almanac by solemnly predicting the death of his rival John Partridge. Lampooning those who took astrological predictions seriously, Swift supplied the precise day and hour of Partridge’s demise: 11 P.M. on March 29, 1708. The dread day arrived, and was followed shortly by printed accounts, written in a style suspiciously Swiftian, of Partridge’s passing. Partridge, outraged, protested that he remained very much alive. Swift dismissed the protests as a hoax perpetrated by persons intent on deceiving the public.
Franklin knew of the Swift stratagem—and knew that most readers in America did not. So he had Richard Saunders declare that the only reason he was commencing publication of his almanac just now—he had long been excessive poor and his wife excessive proud—was that his good friend and fellow student of the stars, Mr. Titan Leeds, was about to expire. Mr. Leeds (really) published an almanac of his own each year, and Saunders said he had not wished to injure him in any regard. “But this obstacle (I am far from speaking it with pleasure) is soon to be removed, since inexorable death, who was never known to respect merit, has already prepared the mortal dart, the fatal sifter has already extended her destroying shears, and that ingenious man must soon be taken from us.”
Typically, Franklin twisted the template he employed; he injected an element of competition into his forecast of impending doom. As colleagues in the astrologic art, Saunders said, both he and Mr. Leeds had cast the latter’s horoscope. By Saunders’s calculation, death would come for Leeds at 3:29 P.M. on October 17, 1733. By Leeds’s calculation (Saunders said), it would tarry till the 26th of the same month. “This small difference between us we have disputed whenever we have met these 9 years past…. Which of us is most exact, a little time will now determine.” Yet whether Leeds’s days were the few more or the few less, they were, by Saunders’s reckoning, irretrievably delimited. “As therefore these provinces may not longer expect to see any of his performances after this year, I think myself free to take up the task, and request a share of the public encouragement.” The reader—purchaser, rather—who provided such encouragement might consider himself “not only as purchasing an useful utensil but as performing an act of charity to his poor friend and servant, R. Saunders.”
A principal advantage of being one’s own printer lay in the opportunity to wait till the last moment to put thought to type; Franklin waited for Titan Leeds to publish his response, in his own almanac for 1734, before taking his hoax to the next step. Leeds upbraided Franklin for Saunders’s “false prediction,” noting for the benefit of his readers that “I have by the mercy of God lived to write a Diary for the year 1734, and to publish the folly and ignorance of this presumptuous author.” Leeds was especially incensed at Franklin’s “gross falsehood” in asserting that he—Leeds—had had the temerity to forecast his own death. “I do not pretend to that knowledge, although he has usurped the knowledge of the Almighty herein, and manifested himself a fool and a liar.” Carefully dating and timing his authorship of this preface as precisely 3:33 P.M. on October 18, 1733, safely past Saunders’s alleged hour of doom, Leeds reminded readers that he had been providing almanacs for many years before Franklin ever appeared, and concluded, “So perhaps I may live to write when his performances are dead.”
By responding so, Leeds delivered himself into Franklin’s hands. Saunders rejoined, in the preface to Poor Richard for 1734, that although an illness in his own family had prevented him from being present at Mr. Leeds’s mortal moment—“to receive his last embrace, to close his eyes, and do the duty of a friend in performing the last offices to the departed”—the woeful event must indeed have occurred.
There is the strongest probability that my dear friend is no more, for there appears in his name, as I am assured, an almanack for the year 1734, in which I am treated in a very gross and unhandsome manner, in which I am called a false predicter, an ignorant, a conceited scribbler, a fool, and a liar. Mr. Leeds was too well bred to use any man so indecently and so scurrilously, and moreover his esteem and affection for me was extraordinary. So that it is to be feared that pamphlet may be only a contrivance of somebody or other, who hopes perhaps to sell two or three years’ almanacks still, by the sole force and virtue of Mr. Leeds’s name.
Notwithstanding his distress at this unfortunate turn of events, Saunders explained to readers that his life on the whole was much improved from the previous year:
Your kind and charitable assistance last year, in purchasing so large an impression of my almanacks, has made my circumstances much more easy in the world, and requires my grateful acknowledgment. My wife has been enabled to get a pot of her own, and is no longer obliged to borrow one from a neighbor, nor have we ever since been without something of our own to put in it. She has also got a pair of shoes, two new shifts, and a new warm petticoat; and for my part, I have bought a second-hand coat, so good that I am now not ashamed to go to town or be seen there. These things have rendered her temper so much more pacific than it used to be, that I may say I have slept more, and more quietly within this last year, than in the three foregoing years put together. Accept my hearty thanks therefor, and my sincere wishes for your health and prosperity.
Leeds learned only a little from his first encounter with Franklin. He congratulated Saunders for his good fortune and that of his wife; yet he could not help asking, for the sake of his readers, “If falsehood and ingenuity be so rewarded, what may he expect if he ever be in a capacity to publish that that is either just or according to art?” Leeds then attempted to brush away this pesky fly: “I shall say little more about him than, as a friend, to advise he will never take upon him to predict or ascribe any person’s death till he has learned to do it better than he did before.”
Franklin refused to let Leeds off so easily. “Whatever may be the music of the spheres, how great soever the harmony of the stars, ’tis certain there is no harmony among the stargazers; but they are perpetually growling and snarling at one another like strange curs, or like some men at their wives.” Of course, it was Franklin who had upset the harmony of the stargazers by trying to break into the almanac market, yet the device of Saunders allowed him to massage the truth with impunity and imagination:
I had resolved to keep the peace on my own part, and affront none of them; and I shall persist in that resolution. But having received much abuse from Titan Leeds deceased (Titan Leeds when living would not have used me so!) I say, having received much abuse from the Ghost of Titan Leeds, who pretends to be still living, and to write almanacks in spite of me and my predictions, I cannot help saying, that though I take it patiently, I take it very unkindly.
And whatever he may pretend, ’tis undoubtedly true that he is really defunct and dead. First because the stars are seldom disappointed, never but in the case of wise men, sapiens dominabitur astris, and they foreshowed his death at the time I predicted it. Secondly, ’Twas requisite and necessary he should die punctually at that time, for the honour of astrology, the art professed both by him and his father before him. Thirdly, ’tis plain to everyone that reads his last two almanacks (for 1734 and 35) that they are not written with that life his performances used to be written with: the wit is low and flat, the little hints dull and spiritless, nothing smart in them but Hudibras’s verses against astrology at the heads of the months in the last, which no astrologer but a dead one would have inserted; and no man living would or could write such stuff as the rest.
Franklin—Saunders, rather—then employed, or misemployed, the words of Leeds himself to deliver the coup de grâce:
In his preface to his almanack for 1734, he says, “Saunders adds another gross falsehood in his almanack, viz., that by my own calculation I shall survive until the 26th of the said month October 1733, which is as untrue as the former.” Now if it be, as Leeds says, untrue and a gross falsehood that he survived till the 26th of October 1733, then it is certainly true that he died beforethat time. And if he died before that time, he is dead now, to all intents and purposes, anything he may say to the contrary notwithstanding.
Franklin milked the ploy shamelessly. In the preface to Poor Richard 1736 he registered his utter indignation that persons envious of his ability to forecast a man’s death should try to steal his reputation by asserting that he—Richard Saunders, Philomath—did not exist. “If there were no such man as I am, how is it possible I should appear publicly to hundreds of people, as I have done for several years past, in print?” Saunders said he would not have deigned to notice these slanders but for the sake of his printer, “to whom my enemies are pleased to ascribe my productions, and who it seems is as unwilling to father my offspring as I am to lose the credit of it.”
When Titan Leeds really did die, Franklin refused to let him rest in peace. Speaking of Leeds’s publishers, Saunders reminded his readers how for several years the Bradfords (William Bradford printed a New York edition to complement Andrew’s Philadelphia version) had refused to admit that Leeds was dead. “At length when the truth could no longer be concealed from the world, they confess his death in their Almanack for 1739, but pretend that he died not till last year, and that before his departure he had furnished them with calculations for 7 years to come. Ah, My Friends,these are poor shifts and thin disguises.” As it happened, Saunders said, just three days earlier Titan Leeds himself had communicated in writing with him from that place where all philomaths must go sooner or later. In this letter, which Saunders helpfully included with his preface, so that readers might know the truth, Leeds reported that Saunders’s original prediction had been accurate—“with a variation only of 5 min. 53 sec. which must be allowed to be no great matter in such cases.”
As was apparent to the least attentive reader, Franklin thoroughly enjoyed adopting the guise of Richard Saunders. Where Franklin the businessman had to be circumspect, careful not to offend, Saunders the almanacker could be outrageous—indeed, the more outrageous the better. Franklin as Franklin often had to hide his gifts to avoid inspiring envy; Franklin as Saunders could flaunt his wit, erudition, and general brilliance. In time—as his position in the community grew more secure—Franklin would no longer require Richard Saunders; till then the alter ego helped keep him sane.
Readers enjoyed Poor Richard as much as Franklin did. Copies went out the door by the single and the gross. In one year John Peter Zenger of New York (lately the defendant in a celebrated libel trial) took eighteen dozen in a batch, then another sixteen dozen. Louis Timothée (who now generally went by Lewis Timothy) in South Carolina ordered twenty-five dozen; Thomas Fleet in Boston also took twenty-five dozen. James Franklin’s widow, Ann, in Newport bought one thousand. These numbers hardly made Poor Richard the bestselling almanac in America; where Poor Richard sold an average of about ten thousand per year, Nathaniel Ames’s Astronomical Diary sold five to six times as many. But Poor Richard had a unique persona, and it developed a loyal readership.
While readers may have come for the quarrels Franklin provoked, they stayed for the advice he dispensed—and the way he dispensed it. Every almanac offered pearls of wisdom on personal conduct and related matters of daily life; that the pearls had been retrieved from other oysters bothered no one except perhaps the owners of those other oysters, who in any event had no recourse in the absence of applicable copyright law. The trick for writers like Franklin was to polish the pearls and set them distinctively; in this he had no peer. What came to be called “the sayings of Poor Richard” first surfaced as filler on the calendar pages of the almanac; the limitations of space, together with Franklin’s inherent economy, taught him to distill each message to its morsel. “Great talkers, little doers” broke no philosophical ground, but for pith it trumped nearly every alternative. “Hunger never saw bad bread”; “Light purse, heavy heart”; “Industry need not wish”; and “Gifts burst rocks” fell into the same category.
Sometimes succinctness yielded—slightly—to sauciness. “Neither a fortress nor a maidenhead will hold out long after they begin to parley.” “Marry your son when you will but your daughter when you can.” “Tell a miser he’s rich, and a woman she’s old, you’ll get no money of one nor kindness of t’other.” “Prythee isn’t Miss Cloe’s a comical case?/She lends out her tail, and she borrows her face.” “The greatest monarch on the proudest throne is obliged to sit upon his own arse.” “Force shits upon reason’s back.”
Poor Richard jabbed at both sexes about equally, and at the professions ecumenically. “One good husband is worth two good wives, for the scarcer things are, the more they’re valued.” “When man and woman die, as poets sung/His heart’s the last part moves, her last the tongue.” “He’s a fool that makes his doctor his heir.” “God heals, and the doctor takes the fees.” “God works wonders now and then/Behold! a lawyer, an honest man!” “A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.” “Never spare the parson’s wine, nor the baker’s pudding.” “Eyes and priests bear no jests.”
The success of Poor Richard would eventually cause Franklin to temper his tone, as the author became increasingly identified with—and therefore publicly responsible for—his creation. But meanwhile Richard Saunders remained “Poor Dick” (as Deborah Franklin liked to call him), irreverent and earthy. “Ignorant men wonder how we astrologers foretell the weather so exactly, unless we deal with the old black Devil,” he wrote.
Alas! ’tis easy as pissing abed. For instance: the stargazer peeps at the heavens through a long glass; he sees perhaps Taurus, or the great bull, in a mighty chase, stamping on the floor of his house, swinging his tail about, stretching out his neck, and opening wide his mouth. ’tis natural from these appearances to judge that this furious bull is puffing, blowing, and roaring. Distance being considered, and time allowed for all this to come down, there you have wind and thunder.
He spies perhaps Virgo (or the Virgin); she turns her head round as it were to see if anybody observed her; then crouching down gently, with her hands on her knees, she looks wistfully for a while right forward. He judges rightly what she’s about; and having calculated the distance and allowed time for its falling, finds that next spring we shall have a fine April shower.