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
his master and gone to sea. Lloyd, poor little homesick Lloyd, was the