ould 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! 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 proba
