Keimer shouts at Franklin from the street by the court-house, with neighbours watching, then climbs into the shop and gives him a quarter's warning. Franklin takes his hat and walks out that instant. That evening Hugh Meredith follows with a partnership: his father will send a press from London, and Franklin's skill will stand against the stock. They keep the plan secret. When Keimer needs Franklin's cuts and types for a New Jersey paper-money job, he sends a civil note and they return. In Burlington Franklin builds a copperplate press, the first seen in the country, cuts ornaments for the bills, and spends three months with assembly men who prefer his talk to Keimer's. Surveyor Isaac Decow, who once wheeled clay for brick-makers, tells him he will work Keimer out of the trade. Those names become the friends the new shop will need.
Before the types arrive, Franklin stops to say what he now believes. Lectures meant to refute Deism made him a Deist; Collins, Ralph, and Governor Keith then showed him that clever argument does not keep people honest. He writes resolutions for truth and integrity in daily dealings and decides he still has a tolerable character to begin the world with. Back in Philadelphia the new types come from London. He and Meredith hire a house near the market, take in the glazier Thomas Godfrey to share the rent, and take their first five shillings from a countryman George House brings in off the street. Samuel Mickle, a noted croaker, warns that Philadelphia is sinking. Franklin had already formed the Junto on Friday nights for queries in morals, politics, and natural philosophy. He composes a sheet a day of the Quakers' history until eleven, and once resets two pages of pied type before bed. Dr Baird tells the merchants' club he sees Franklin still at work after the others have gone home. When George Webb leaks Franklin's newspaper plan to Keimer, Franklin writes as the Busy Body in Bradford's paper, ridicules Keimer's proposals, and later buys Keimer's failing sheet for a trifle.
Meredith's father pays only one hundred pounds. A merchant sues for the rest. William Coleman and Robert Grace come separately, unasked, each offering enough money to let Franklin take the shop alone if the partnership fails. Franklin waits until Meredith admits he was bred a farmer, then buys him out for the father's hundred, Meredith's small debts, thirty pounds, and a new saddle. He takes half the loan from each friend, advertises the shop in his own name about 1729, and writes an anonymous pamphlet, The Nature and Necessity of a Paper Currency. The House votes the addition. His friends give him the profitable job of printing the money itself, then the Newcastle bills and laws. He opens a stationer's shop, dresses plainly, and sometimes wheels paper home through the streets. Keimer sells up and goes to Barbados. David Harry rejects a partnership, lives like a gentleman, and follows him. Bradford still holds the post-office and forbids the riders to carry Franklin's papers, so Franklin bribes them privately and remembers never to copy that meanness if he ever holds the office himself.
Mrs Godfrey tries to match him with a relation's daughter, then the family shuts the girl away after Bradford says printing does not pay. Franklin looks elsewhere, then takes Deborah Read to wife on 1 September 1730, correcting as well as he can the great erratum of leaving her when he went to London. The Junto first clubs its books in Robert Grace's room. The collection splits after a year. Franklin then draws up proposals for a subscription library, gets the scrivener Brockden to put them in form, and with Junto friends raises fifty subscribers at forty shillings each, plus ten shillings a year. It becomes, he says, the mother of all the North American subscription libraries. The memoir breaks here. Abel James writes from Paris that twenty-three handwritten sheets have reached him, ending in 1730, and that life is uncertain if kind Ben Franklin leaves the rest unwritten.
