the two years following his removal from school he was employed in his father's business. When he expressed a firm disinclination to become a tallow chandler, his father attempted to discover his natural bent by taking him about to see various artisans at their work. Everything that Franklin touched taught him something; and everything that he learned, he used. Though his tour of the trades failed to win him to any mechanical occupation, "it has ever since been a pleasure to me," he says, "to see good workmen handle their tools; and it has been useful to me, having learnt so much by it as to be able to do little odd jobs myself in my house, . . . and to construct little machines for my experiments, while the intention of making the experiment was fresh and warm in my mind." Throughout his boyhood and youth he apparently devoured every book that he could lay hands upon. He went through his father's shelves of "polemic divinity"; read abundantly in Plutarch's Lives; acquired Bunyan's works "in separate little volumes," which he later sold to buy Burton's Historical Collections; received an impetus towards practical improvements from Defoe's Essay on Projects, and an impetus towards virtue from Mather's Essays to Do Good. Before he left Boston he had his mind opened to free speculation and equipped for logical reasoning by Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, the Port Royal Art of Thinking, Xenophon's Memorabilia, and the works of Shaftesbury and Collins.
