rch.
These were the bright lines and spots in his strenuous young life. He
played and sang the gathering brood of cares out of his own and his
mother's heart. He needed to play and he 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!