William Lloyd Garrison | Page 4

and chased, they would plunge into the water and
escape to the wharf on which they had left their clothes." Such was the
little man with a boy's irrepressible passion for frolic and fun. His
passion for music was hardly less pronounced, and this he inherited
from his mother, and exercised to his heart's content in the choir of the
Baptist Church. These were the bright lines and spots in his strenuous
young life. He played and sang the gathering brood of cares out of his
own and his mother's heart. He needed to play and he needed to sing to
charm away from his spirit the vulture of poverty. That evil bird
hovered ever over his childhood. It was able to do many hard things to
him, break up his home, sunder him from his mother, force him at a
tender age to earn his bread, still there was another bird in the boy's
heart, which sang out of it the shadow and into it the sunshine.
Whatever was his lot there sang the bird within his breast, and there
shone the sun over his head and into his soul. The boy had
unconsciously drawn around him a circle of sunbeams, and how could
the vulture of poverty strike him with its wings or stab him with its

beak. When he was about eight he was parted from his mother, she
going to Lynn, and he, wee mite of a man, remaining in Newburyport.
It was during the War of 1812, and pinching times, when Fanny
Garrison was at her wit's end to keep the wolf from devouring her three
little ones and herself into the bargain. With what tearing of the
heart-strings she left Lloyd and his little sister Elizabeth behind we can
now only imagine. She had no choice, poor soul, for unless she toiled
they would starve. So with James, her eldest son, she went forth into
the world to better theirs and her own condition. Lloyd went to live in
Deacon Ezekiel Bartlett's family. They were good to the little fellow,
but they, too, were poor. The Deacon, among other things, sawed wood
for a living, and Lloyd hardly turned eight years, followed him in his
peregrinations from house to house doing with his tiny hands what he
could to help the kind old man. Soon Fanny Lloyd's health, which had
supported her as a magic staff in all those bitter years since Abijah's
desertion of wife and children, began in the battle for bread in Lynn, to
fail her. And so, in her weakness, and with a great fear in her heart for
her babies, when she was gone from them into the dark unknown
forever, she bethought her of making them as fast as possible
self-supporting. And what better way was there than to have the boys
learn some trade. James she had already apprenticed to learn the
mystery of shoemaking. And for Lloyd she now sent and apprenticed
him, too, to the same trade. Oh! but it was hard for the little man, the
heavy lapstone and all this thumping and pounding to make a shoe. Oh!
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