last meeting is not for you and me, reader, to look into.  Soon after Lloyd’s return to Newburyport a cancerous tumor developed on her shoulder, from the effects of which she died September 3, 1823, at the age of forty-five.  More than a decade after her death her son wrote:  “She has been dead almost eleven years; but my grief at her loss is as fresh and poignant now as it was at that period;” and he breaks out in praise of her personal charms in the following original lines: 

  “She was the masterpiece of womankind—­
  In shape and height majestically fine;
  Her cheeks the lily and the rose combined;
  Her lips—­more opulently red than wine;
  Her raven locks hung tastefully entwined;
  Her aspect fair as Nature could design;
  And then her eyes! so eloquently bright! 
  An eagle would recoil before her light.”

The influence of this superb woman was a lasting power for truth and righteousness in the son’s stormy life.  For a whole year after her death, the grief of the printer’s lad over his loss, seemed to have checked the activity of his pen.  For during that period nothing of his appeared in the Herald.  But after the sharp edge of his sorrow had worn off, his pen became active again in the discussion of public men and public questions.  It was a period of bitter personal and political feuds and animosities.  The ancient Federal party was in articulo mortis.  The death-bed of a great political organization proves oftentimes the graveyard of lifelong friendships.  For it is a scene of crimination and recrimination.  And so it happened that the partisans of John Adams, and the partisans of John Adams’s old Secretary of State, Timothy Pickering, were in 1824 doing a thriving business in this particular line.  Into this funereal performance our printer’s apprentice entered with pick and spade.  He had thus early a penchant for controversy, a soldier’s scent for battle.  If there was any fighting going on he proceeded directly to have a hand in it.  And it cannot be denied that that hand was beginning to deal some manly and sturdy blows, whose resound was heard quite distinctly beyond the limits of his birthplace.  His communications appeared now, not only in the Herald, but in the Salem Gazette as well.  Now it was the Adams-Pickering controversy, now the discussion of General Jackson as a presidential candidate, now the state of the country in respect of parties, now the merits of “American Writers,” which afforded his ’prentice hand the requisite practice in the use of the pen.  He had already acquired a perfect knowledge of typesetting and the mechanical makeup of a newspaper.  During his apprenticeship he took his first lesson in the art of thinking on his feet in the presence of an audience.  The audience to be sure were the members of a debating club, which he had organized.  He was very ambitious and was doubtless looking forward to a political career.