William Lloyd Garrison eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 394 pages of information about William Lloyd Garrison.

William Lloyd Garrison eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 394 pages of information about William Lloyd Garrison.
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 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
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William Lloyd Garrison from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.