Excerpt from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and a Sketch of Franklin's Life From the Point Where the Autobiography Ends, Drawn Chiefly From His Letters: With Notes and a Chronological Historical Table Like Lincoln, Frana was of humble parentage. The rep resentative, for many years in a spiritual as well as official sense, of the middle colonies, Franklin was born in Boston. It was in the year 1706, Queen Anne was served by a group of brilliant writers at home, and the colonies were fairly content in the new world. There were but ten of them and their combined population did not reach four hundred thousand; a thin skirmish line of civilization stretched over the breadth of an immense and hostile continent. The earliest of American journalists came at a time when there was but one newspaper in the colonies. His father, an English dissenter, had time to Boston in 1685 and became a tallow-chandler. The boy had various schooling, partly at home, partly at the Boston Latin School, and partly under a teacher of some local reputation; but his formal education was ended prematurely in his eleventh year. His parents talked of the church as a career; the boy talked of the sea: but for two years his work was in his father's shop, cutting wick for the candles, filling the dipping mould and the mould for east candles, attending the shop, going of errands. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.