into the night, a diligence which led a Philadelphian to
remark that "the industry of that Franklin is superior
to anything I ever saw of the kind; I see him still at
work when I go home from my club, and he is at work
again before his neighbors are out of bed." Even after
the necessity for severe labor was over, in his "scheme
of employment for the 24 hours of a natural day," he
allotted for sleep only six hours, or those between ten
and four.

If his constitutional and muscular vigor enabled him
thus to tax his body, it did not save him from the ill-
nesses his parents had escaped. In 1727, so he states,
"when I was just pass'd my twenty-first year, I was
taken ill. My distemper was a pleurisy which very
nearly carried me off. I suffered a great deal, gave up
the point in my own mind and was rather disappointed
when I found myself recovering, regretting, in some
degree, that I must now, sometime or other, have all
that disagreeable work to do over." In 1735 he had a
second attack of this complaint, of so serious a charac-
ter that the left lung suppurated. Prior to these two
seizures, too, he thought he had avoided an illness only
by "having read somewhere that cold water, drank
plentifully, was good for a fever" and when "in the
evening I found myself very feverish," "I followed the
prescription, sweat plentifully most of the night, and
the next morning was well again." This is the more
interesting since for many years afterward the usual
treatment for fevers involved the entire denial of water
to the sufferer.

In another way Franklin differed from his own gen-

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