"
One and another remarked, keeping up a continual fire at Benjamin,
with jokes and arguments and ridicule, until he sat down and went to
devouring a cod with the rest of them. That was the end of his queer
notion about killing fish; it was buried there in the sea; and
Benjamin never again resurrected it, but ate what other people did.
But the episode furnished sport for the sailors all the way from Block
Island to New York, where they arrived in about three days from the
time the sloop left Boston.
Benjamin did not know a person in the city of New York, nor had he a
single letter of recommendation to any one, and the money in his
pocket but a trifle. It was in October, 1723, that he arrived in New
York, a youth of seventeen years, a runaway in a city, without a
solitary acquaintance, and scarcely money enough to pay a week's
board! Perhaps, with all the rest, he carried an upbraiding conscience
under his jacket, more discomforting than to be a stranger in a
strange land.
At this crisis of Benjamin's life, he appeared to be on the highway to
ruin. There is scarcely one similar case in ten, where the runaway
escapes the vortex of degradation. Benjamin would have been no
exception, but for his early religious training and his love of books.
The case of William Hutton, who was the son of very poor parents, is
very similar to that of Benjamin Franklin.
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