Franklin returned to Philadelphia laden with years and honors; yet still his country could not let him repose. For three successive years he was elected President of Pennsylvania; but the labors entailed were not severe, and the old man found time for amusement and quiet study. We have a beautiful picture of his life at home with his daughter and her family in one of his letters of the time: "The companions of my youth are indeed almost all departed; but I find an agreeable society among their children and grandchildren. I have public business enough to preserve me from ennui, and private amusement besides in conversation, books, my garden, and cribbage. Considering our well-furnished, plentiful market as the best of gardens, I am turning mine, in the midst of which my house stands, into grass plots and gravel walks, with trees and flowering shrubs. Cards we sometimes play here in long winter evenings; but it is as they play at chess,--not for money, but for honor, or the pleasure of beating one another. This will not be quite a novelty to you, as you may remember we played together in that manner during the winter at Passy. I have indeed now and then a little compunction in reflecting that I spend time so idly. But another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering: '_You know that the soul is immortal. Why, then, should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?_' So, being easily convinced, and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason when it is in favor of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game." Yet the old man could not but feel lonely at times in the new society growing up about him. He says pathetically in another letter: "I seem to have intruded myself into the company of posterity, when I ought to have been abed and asleep."
In 1787 the constitutional convention met in Philadelphia, and it was a fitting thing that the statesman and philosopher should live to aid in framing laws by which his country is still governed. He was now too weak to stand long, so that his speeches on various questions had to be read out by a friend. His work in the convention was altogether subordinate to that of Madison and one or two other leading spirits; but his part in reconciling various factious elements in the convention was of the greatest importance. When at last the deadlock came between the smaller and the larger States on the question of representation in the legislature, it was Franklin who saved the day by a suggestion which led to the famous compromise, making the Senate represent the individual States, while the lower house is proportioned to population. Washington presided over the assembly; and we are told that while "the last members were signing, Dr. Franklin, looking towards the president's chair, at the back of which a rising sun happened to be painted, observed to a few members near him that painters had found it difficult to distinguish in their art a rising from a setting sun. 'I have,' said he, 'often and often in the course of the session and the vicissitudes of my hopes and fears as to its issue looked at that behind the president without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting; but now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising, and not a setting sun.'"