Free The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands Page B

dark corner to the side of the fire, and retired early.
    The next morning he headed out with the first travelers and made it almost to Burlington by nightfall. This evening passed more pleasantly than the previous; his host, a Dr. Brown, delighted to find a guest whosereading and interests approached his. Franklin and the physician spent hours conversing on various topics. (The acquaintance struck up on this occasion continued, as it happened, for the rest of Brown’s life.)
    Rested and with his spirits revived, Franklin walked the remaining several miles to Burlington the following morning, a Saturday. To his renewed discouragement, however, he discovered that he had just missed the regular packet boat to Philadelphia and that the next would not be leaving until Tuesday. An elderly matron of the village took pity on him, fed him a dinner of ox cheek, and offered to lodge him till the boat came. He accepted the invitation and resigned himself to a long weekend in the hinterlands of New Jersey. But that evening after supper, while stretching his legs by the bank of the Delaware, he spied a boat that appeared to be headed decisively downstream. His inquiries revealed that it was indeed bound for Philadelphia, and, yes, there was room for one more. With no time to beg leave of his hostess, he climbed aboard, and off they went. The current was nearly slack in this part of the river, and the wind afforded little help, so the young and strong among the passengers took turns at the oars. Franklin, younger and stronger than most, pulled more than his share.
    They rowed for several hours through the darkness until some on board wondered whether they had passed their destination by mistake. Tired and uncertain, the rowers refused to pull anymore. A collective decision was made to put in to shore, where several of the passengers started a fire of old fence rails they stumbled upon, to ward off the cold of the October night. At daylight one of them recognized their campsite as being only a short distance above Philadelphia. They wearily clambered back into the boat and finished their voyage, landing early on Sunday morning at the wharf at the foot of Market Street.
    As Franklin walked up from the dock, the ravages of the South Sea collapse remained everywhere apparent. “I saw most of the houses in Walnut Street between Second and Front Streets with bills on their doors, to be let,” he recalled; “and many likewise in Chestnut Street and other streets, which made me then think the inhabitants of the city were one after another deserting it.”
    At the time, Franklin could not connect the empty houses and shuttered shops with the collapse of the money supply in London. The money supply that worried him was his own. He touched shore in Philadelphia with a single Dutch dollar in his pocket, received in change inNew York. He also had a hole in his belly from four days on the road and a long night of rowing and shivering.
    He got his first lesson in imperial economics when he tried to purchase breakfast and discovered, to his relief and gratification, that one Dutch dollar went further in Philadelphia than it did farther north. Upon meeting a boy carrying a basket of bread, he inquired as to the loaves’ provenance. The boy pointed in the direction of Second Street; Franklin’s hunger-sharpened senses guided him the rest of the way to the bakery. He asked for biscuit, the sort of thing Boston’s bakers produced by the barrel for the ship trade. Philadelphia’s bakers made nothing of the sort, he was told. He requested a threepenny loaf—in Boston a step up from biscuit. He learned that threepenny loaves were not made in Philadelphia either. At a loss, he asked for threepence’ worth of whatever they did make in this city. The baker handed him three large, puffy rolls, each the size of the threepenny loaves he had been accustomed to purchase in Boston. The rolls were too big to fit in his pockets, and he had no bag to carry