how the
stiff waxen threads cut into his soft fingers, how all his body ached
with the constrained position and the rough work of shoemaking. But one
day the little nine-year-old, who was "not much bigger than a last," was
able to produce a real shoe. Then it was probably that a dawning
consciousness of power awoke within the child's mind. He himself by
patience and industry had created a something where before was nothing.
The eye of the boy got for the first time a glimpse of the man, who was
still afar off, shadowy in the dim approaches of the hereafter. But the
work proved altogether beyond the strength of the boy. The shoemaker's
bench was not his place, and the making of shoes for his kind was not
the mission for which he was sent into the world. And now again poverty,
the great scene-shifter, steps upon the stage, and Fanny Lloyd and her
two boys are in Baltimore on that never-ending quest for bread. She had
gone to work in a shoe factory established by an enterprising Yankee in
that city. The work lasted but a few months, when the proprietor failed
and the factory was closed. In a strange city mother and children were
left without employment. In her anxiety and distress a new trouble, the
greatest and most poignant since Abijah's desertion, wrung her with a
supreme grief. James, the light and pride of her life, had run away from
his master and gone to sea. Lloyd, poor little homesick Lloyd, was the
only consolation left the broken heart. And he did not want to live in
Baltimore, and longed to return to Newburyport. So, mindful of her
child's happiness, and all unmindful of her own, she sent him from her
to Newburyport, which he loved inexpressibly. He was now in his eleventh
year. Very happy he was to see once more the streets and landmarks of
the old town--the river, and the old house where he was born, and the
church next door and the school-house across the way and the dear
friends whom he loved and who loved him. He went again to live with the
Bartletts, doing with his might all that he could to earn his daily
bread, and to repay the kindness of the dear old deacon and his family.
It was at this time that he received his last scrap of schooling. He
was, as we have seen, but eleven, but precious little of that brief and
tender time had he been able to spend in a school-house. He had gone to
the primary school, where, as his children tell us, he did not show
himself "an apt scholar, being slow in mastering the