Sketches New and Old


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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 toward 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 grout 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  
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