William Lloyd Garrison | Page 5

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 alphabet, and surpassed even by
his little sister Elizabeth." During his stay with Deacon Bartlett the first
time, he was sent three months to the grammar-school, and now on his
return to this good friend, a few more weeks were added to his scant
school term. They proved the last of his school-days, and the boy went
forth from the little brick building on the Mall to finish his education in
the great workaday world, under those stern old masters, poverty and
experience. By and by Lloyd was a second time apprenticed to learn a
trade. It was to a cabinetmaker in Haverhill, Mass. He made good
progress in the craft, but his young heart still turned to Newburyport
and yearned for the friends left there. He bore up against the
homesickness as best he could, and when he could bear it no longer,
resolved to run away from the making of toy bureaus, to be once more
with the Bartletts. He had partly executed this resolution, being several
miles on the road to his old home, when his master, the cabinetmaker,

caught up to him and returned him to Haverhill. But when he heard the
little fellow's story of homesickness and yearning for loved places and
faces, he was not angry with him, but did presently release him from
his apprenticeship. And so the boy to his great joy found himself again
in Newburyport and with the good old wood-sawyer. Poverty and
experience were teaching the child what he never could have learned in
a grammar-school, a certain acquaintance with himself and the world
around him. There was growing within his breast a self-care and a
self-reliance. It was the autumn of 1818, when, so to speak, the boy's
primary education in the school of experience terminated, and he
entered on the second stage of his training under the same rough
tutelage. At the age of thirteen he entered the office of the Newburyport
Herald to learn to set types. At last his boy's hands had found work
which his boy's heart did joy to have done. He soon mastered the
compositor's art, became a remarkably rapid composer. As he set up the
thoughts of others, he was not slow in discovering thoughts of his own
demanding utterance. The printer's apprentice felt the stirrings of a new
life. A passion for self-improvement took possession of him. He began
to read the English classics, study American history, follow the currents
of party politics. No longer could it be said of him that he was not an
apt pupil. He was indeed singularly apt. His intelligence quickened
marvelously. The maturing process was sudden and swift. Almost
before one knows it the boy in years has become a man in judgment
and character. This precipitate development of the intellectual life in
him, produced naturally enough an appreciable enlargement of the ego.
The young eagle had abruptly awakened to the knowledge that he
possessed wings; and wings were for use--to soar with. Ambition, the
desire to mount aloft, touched and fired the boy's mind. As he read,
studied, and observed, while his hands were busy with his work, there
was a constant fluttering going on in the eyrie of his thoughts. By an
instinct analogous to that which sends a duck to the water, the boy took
to the discussion of public questions. It was as if an innate force was
directing him toward his mission--the reformation of great public
wrongs. At sixteen he made his first contribution to the press. It was a
discussion of a quasi-social subject, the relation of the sexes in society.
He was at the impressionable age, when the rosy god of love is at his
tricks. He was also