ing and rendered exact accounts of every item expended to his worthy friend the Treasurer, which the latter faithfully records, he must have found local custom too strong to resist, and doubtless with resignation submitted and with a protest charged the idle expenditure to the Academy funds. These are the little pictures which display to us customs of time and place.[1]
An offer from Mr. Samuel Hazard made to the Trustees and reported to them at the meeting of 10 November, 1750, to sell them two lots, one on each side of the Academy lot, subject to Ground Rents, for the sum of three hundred pounds, was accepted. One of these was twenty-five feet on Fourth Street by one hundred and thirty-nine feet eight inches adjoining the Academy lot on the north, and the other thirty-four feet by one hundred and forty feet adjoining on the south. This gave the Trustees a frontage of two hundred and nine feet on Fourth Street. The first payment of £155 was made on 27 February, and the balance of £145 on 23 April following. This increase of Real Estate, which it will be seen was added to in 1753, by absorbing all the ground Northward to Arch Street, was simply an indication on the part of those interested that they were planting for the future an institution of far reaching capabilities and usefulness; the sagacity exhibited in these purchases was equalled only by the faith held by these gentlemen in the great promises of their Academy and Charity School.
Franklin's summary of the work now begun must be told by his own narrative, which cannot be equalled in another's language. To Jared Eliot he is writing on 13 February, 1750–51,[2] and after giving "his thoughts about the northeast storms beginning to leeward," and an account of his visit to Schuyler's copper mines in New Jersey the previous Autumn, he proceeds,
It will be agreeable to you to hear, that our subscription goes on
- ↑ In his essay on the Vice of Drunkenness in the New England Courant which Franklin had written more than twenty-five years before, he said: "I doubt not but moderate Drinking has been improved for the Diffusion of Knowledge among the ingenious Part of Mankind who want the Talent of a ready utterance, in order to discover the Conceptions of their Minds in an entertaining and intelligible Manner." Did he now recall this sentiment in the tipple to these workmen?
- ↑ Bigelow, ii. 164.
