“False, false, ’tis a plot!” Warwick Lowther was exclaiming, and the mob began to clamour so that I must exert my lungs to the utmost.
“When the hardness of the wax freed Dennis from suspicion, you swiftly and cunningly diverted it to the old man, who was not there to defend himself,” I shouted, and then took a thrust at the Colonel for evicting my brother. “You easily duped Colonel Clinton with your talk of a fresh battle between uncle and nephew, and of the stripes of wax upon Blossom’s wig. You were confident there was no wax upon your own wig, and when I suggested your hair be red, you were not afraid to show it, believing no wax to be on your red stubble. Perchance you even look’d in a glass to be safe.
“Bring two looking-glasses,” I cried.
When I bade him look at himself in one of them, he quickly did so, and shrugg’d, no doubt relieved. But I moved the second glass to the back of his head, as tho’ I were his barber, and said: “Silversmith, when you sprang back from the kettle, your freshly cut hair brush’d the frame of wicks behind you. Yet you have assured this company you did not go near the dipping machine.”
He stared into his mirror like a pig poison’d, for he could see, reflected in mine, the stripes of bayberry wax on the back of his red head.
Then his freckled face became hard and calm, and he turn’d to me. He stood very tall for such a short man. He stared upward through me as tho’ I were a mist. And, without apology or complaint, he sternly said: “I did my best to feed my family.”
Following his uplifted gaze, I, too, stared at the row of young Lowthers upon the staircase, and I need not describe their uncomprehending and distraught expressions.
Like Icarus of mythology, I felt my triumph lose its wings.
The mob was sufficiently amazed by my deductions, and so sober’d that Warwick Lowther was allow’d to be hang’d by the proper authorities, which doleful event I did not attend. It cost me much unrest and some of my books, which I sold to give help to the widow; and I ponder’d that a fund ought to be set up, offering loans to those displaced artisans who, tho’ showing capability and industriousness, need a respite from starvation in which to establish themselves. In later years I was able to arrange such a fund for Philadelphia.
As for my return from the crowded candle shop, it was greeted by my brother James’s unreasonable fist. He set me to useless labours till midnight... My now well known aversion to arbitrary power, which a lifetime of public service has express’d, stems from my brother’s tyrannical treatment of me.
Bitterly upon my knees, I scrubb’d the press while, beyond the flickering candles, glowering and smiling, James composed much satire against the authorities. As a result, he was taken up and imprison’d for a month. His discharge was accompanied by an order of the House that he “should no longer print the paper call’d the New England Courant.”
My brother’s means of evading this order produced my own means of escape; for he return’d my apprenticeship indenture to me so that his paper might be printed for the future, as indeed for a time it was, under my own name, Benjamin Franklin.
Author’s Postscript: The fictional adventure you have just read has its source in the early part of Benjamin Franklin’s AUTOBIOGRAPHY (the Bigelow version). Remember that these events were supposed to have occurred in the America of 1722, which was a very different fettle of fish from, let us say, 1776, just before the Revolutionary War. The chief problems in 1722 were not with the British; they were with the French and Indians, they were the rivalries among the colonies themselves, and they arose from the ideological struggle between weakening Puritan theocracy (Cotton Mather did not die until 1728) and such “insidious European doctrines” as rationalism and scientific method. Complete independence from England was utterly inconceivable in 1722. The bonds tying the colonies and England were so close at that time that travel to England, for example, was as common as to the other colonies — and hardly more inconvenient!
Editors’ Postscript: There is no doubt of it: had Benjamin Franklin turned his mind to it, he could have been the forerunner of what we now call a detective — and if he had turned his pen to it, he might have anticipated Edgar Allan Poe’s invention of the modem detective story. Benjamin Franklin was no mean inventor, you know!
