e. There were, moreover, immediate
liabilities to be met. She could find no way out, and the upshot was a
public auction sale of the farm effects and the household furniture.
Three-year-old David, not understanding the tragedy of it all, was
nevertheless impressed by the scene on the day the neighbors came to
bid for, and to buy, the things that made up his mother's home. Even
now he can recall how the tables and chairs from the house, and the
plows and harrows from the fields, were scheduled and ticketed in and
around the homestead and disposed of by the auction to the highest
bidder. He could not understand it, but somewhere deep within the
sensitive child was struck a note of pain, the echoes of which have
never left him throughout his strenuous life. He felt dimly in his
childlike way the loneliness of his mother. He has never forgotten it.
Lonely indeed she was. She had but one friend to turn to, and that one
friend was her brother, Richard Lloyd, the village shoemaker up in
North Wales. To him she wrote and told her story.

It was her letter which Richard Lloyd paused in his work to read that
day some fifty years ago. This village cobbler, destined unwittingly
to play such an important part in the history of the British Empire, is
still alive and hale and hearty, still lives in his old district. I
saw him recently, a tall, erect, fearless-eyed man, though in the
neighborhood of ninety, perhaps past that age. He had a full beard,
snow-white, and a clean-shaven upper lip, reminiscent of the fashion of
half a century ago. He lives, of course, in comfort now and enjoys a
dignified, happy old age. Vigorous still, he continues to preach in
the chapel of the Nonconformist denomination of which he is a member.
I tried to picture him as he must have been fifty years back, a
studious, middle-aged man, rigidly religious, a confirmed bachelor,
dividing his time between his calling, on the one hand, and the study
of the Bible, on the other.

He lived at that time a laborious life, frugal by necessity, doing his
duty as he saw it, and I dare say he appeared to a casual observer an
uninteresting village type, a silent man, sincere in his bigoted way,
but colorless as such persons must always be to those of a different
class. To me he will remain one of the most interesting men I have
ever seen. Richard Lloyd read his sister's letter and formed his
resolution. He decided to go to her help. And thus it was he
jo