William Lloyd Garrison | Page 4

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 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