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 naïvely 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,