in all fifteen articles on a variety of topics, such as “South American Affairs,” “State Politics,” “A Glance at Europe,” etc., all of which are interesting now chiefly as showing the range of his growing intelligence, and as the earliest steps by which he acquired his later mastery of the pen and powerful style of composition.  In a letter addressed to his mother about this time, the boy is full of Lloyd, undisguisedly proud of Lloyd, believes in Lloyd.  “When I peruse them over” (i.e. those fifteen communications to the press), “I feel absolutely astonished,” he naively confesses, “at the different subjects which I have discussed, and the style in which they are written.  Indeed it is altogether a matter of surprise that I have met with such signal success, seeing I do not understand one single rule of grammar, and having a very inferior education.”  The printer’s lad was plainly not lacking in the bump of approbativeness, or the quality of self-assertiveness.  The quick mother instinct of Fanny Garrison took alarm at the tone of her boy’s letter.  Possibly there was something in Lloyd’s florid sentences, in his facility of expression, which reminded her of Abijah.  He, too, poor fellow, had had gifts in the use of the pen, and what had he done, what had he come to?  Had he not forsaken wife and children by first forsaking the path of holiness?  So she pricks the boy’s bubble, and points him to the one thing needful—­God in the soul.  But in her closing words she betrays what we all along suspected, her own secret pleasure in her son’s success, when she asks, “Will you be so kind as to bring on your pieces that you have written for me to see?” Ah! was she not every inch a mother, and how Lloyd did love her.  But she was no longer what she had been.  And no wonder, for few women have been called to endure such heavy burdens, fight so hopelessly the battle for bread, all the while her heart was breaking with grief.  Disease had made terrible inroads upon her once strong and beautiful person.  Not the shadow of the strength and beauty of her young womanhood remained.  She was far away from her early home and friends, far away from her darling boy, in Baltimore.  James, her pride, was at sea, Elizabeth, a sweet little maiden of twelve, had left her to take that last voyage beyond another sea, and Abijah, without one word of farewell, with the silence of long years unbroken, he, too, also! had hoisted sail and was gone forever.  And now in her loneliness and sorrow, knowing that she, too, must shortly follow, a great yearning rose up in her poor wounded heart to see once more her child, the comfort and stay of her bitter life.  And as she had written to him her wish and longing, the boy went to her, saw the striking change, saw that the broken spirit of the saintly woman was day by day nearing the margin of the dark hereafter, into whose healing waters it would bathe and be whole again.  The unspeakable experience of mother and son, during this