His simplest acts, also, were contrived with a view to their being held up for the emulation of boys forever--boys who might otherwise have been happy.

It was in this spirit that he became the son of a soap-boiler, and probably for no other reason than that the efforts of all future boys who tried to be anything might be looked upon with suspicion unless they were the sons of soap-boilers.
With a malevolence which is without parallel in history, he would work all day, and then sit up nights, and let on to be studying algebra by the light of a smoldering fire, so that all other boys might have to do that also, or else have Benjamin Franklin thrown up to them.

Not satisfied with these proceedings, he had a fashion of living wholly on bread and water, and studying astronomy at meal-time--a thing which has brought affliction to millions of boys since, whose fathers had read Franklin's pernicious biography.
His maxims were full of animosity toward boys.

Nowadays a boy cannot follow out a single natural instinct without tumbling over some of those everlasting aphorisms and hearing from Franklin, on the spot.

If he buys two cents' worth of peanuts, his father says, "Remember what Franklin has said, my son--'A grout a day's a penny a year"'; and the comfort is all gone out of those peanuts.