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