When Franklin reached London, he found that the governor was one of those men who promise great things, but do nothing.  Instead of buying a press, he had to go to work in a printing-office to earn his bread.  He stayed in London more than a year.  At the office where he worked the men were great beer-drinkers.  One of his companions bought six pints a day.  He began with a pint before breakfast, then took another pint at breakfast, then a pint between breakfast and dinner, then a pint at dinner, then a pint in the afternoon, and, last of all, a pint after he had done work.  Franklin drank nothing but water.  The others laughed at him, and nicknamed him the “Water-American”; but after a while they had to confess that he was stronger than they were who drank so much strong beer.

The fact was that Franklin could beat them both at work and at play.  When they went out for a bath in the Thames,[14] they found that their “Water-American” could swim like a fish; and he so astonished them that a rich Londoner tried to persuade him to start a swimming-school to teach his sons, but Franklin had stayed in England long enough, and he now decided to go back to Philadelphia.

[Footnote 14:  Thames (Tems).  London is on the river Thames.]

116.  Franklin sets up his newspaper; “sawdust pudding.”—­After his return to America, Franklin labored so diligently that he was soon able to set up a newspaper of his own.  He tried to make it a good one.  But some people thought that he spoke his mind too freely.  They complained of this to him, and gave him to understand that if he did not make his paper to please them, they would stop taking it or advertising in it.

Franklin heard what they had to say, and then invited them all to come and have supper with him.  They went, expecting a feast, but they found nothing on the table but two dishes of corn-meal mush and a big pitcher of cold water.  That kind of mush was then eaten only by very poor people; and because it was yellow and coarse, it was nicknamed “sawdust pudding.”

[Illustration:  FRANKLIN EATING “SAWDUST PUDDING.”]

Franklin gave everybody a heaping plateful, and then, filling his own, he made a hearty supper of it.  The others tried to eat, but could not.  After Franklin had finished his supper, he looked up, and said quietly, “My friends, any one who can live on ‘sawdust pudding’ and cold water, as I can, does not need much help from others.”  After that, no one went to the young printer with complaints about his paper.  Franklin, as we have seen,[15] had learned to stoop; but he certainly did not mean to go stooping through life.

[Footnote 15:  See paragraph 114.]

117.  Franklin’s plan of life; what he did for Philadelphia.—­Not many young men can see their own faults, but Franklin could.  More than that, he tried hard to get rid of them.  He kept a little book in which he wrote down his faults.  If he wasted half an hour of time or a shilling of money, or said anything that he had better not have said, he wrote it down in his book.  He carried that book in his pocket all his life, and he studied it as a boy at school studies a hard lesson.  By it he learned three things,—­first, to do the right thing; next, to do it at the right time; last of all, to do it in the right way.