[JOHN URI LLOYD]
John Uri Lloyd, novelist and scientist, was born at West Bloomfield, New York, April 19, 1849. He is the son of a civil engineer who came West, in 1853, for the purpose of surveying a railroad between Covington and Louisville, known as the "River Route." Mr. Lloyd was thus four years old when his father settled at Burlington, Boone county, Kentucky, near the line of the road. The panic of 1854 came and the railroad company failed, but his parents preferred their new Kentucky home to the old home in the East, and they decided to remain, taking up their first vocations, that of teaching. For several years they taught in the village schools of the three little Kentucky towns of Burlington, Petersburg, and Florence. Mr. Lloyd lived at Florence until he was fourteen years of age, when he was apprenticed to a Cincinnati druggist, but he continued to be a resident of Kentucky until 1876, since which time he has lived at Cincinnati. In 1878 he became connected with the Cincinnati College of Pharmacy, and this connection has continued to the present day. In 1880 he was married to a Kentucky woman. Mr. Lloyd is one of the most distinguished pharmaceutical chemists in the United States. He has a magnificent library and museum upon his subjects; and he is generally conceded to be the world's highest authority on puff-balls. Mr. Lloyd's scientific works include The Chemistry of Medicines (1881); Drugs and Medicines of North America (1884); King's American Dispensatory (1885); Elixirs, their History and Preparation (1892); and he, as president, has edited the publications of the Lloyd Library, as follows: Dr. B. S. Barton's Collections (1900); Dr. Peter Smith's Indian Doctor's Dispensatory (1901); A Study in Pharmacy (1902); Dr. David Schopf's Materia Medica Americana (1903); Dr. Manasseh Cutler's Vegetable Productions (1903); Reproductions from the Works of William Downey, John Carver, and Anthony St. Storck (1907); Hydrastis Canadensis (1908); Samuel Thomson and Thomsonian Materia Medica (1909). Dr. Lloyd has won his general reputation as a writer of novels descriptive of life in northern Kentucky. His first work to attract wide attention was entitled Etidorpha, or the End of Earth (New York, 1895), a work which involved speculative philosophy. This was followed by a little story, The Right Side of the Car (Boston, 1897). Then came the Stringtown stories, which made his reputation. "Stringtown" is the fictional name for the Kentucky Florence of his boyhood. There are four of them: Stringtown on the Pike (New York, 1900); Warwick of the Knobs (New York, 1901); Red Head (New York, 1903); and Scroggins (New York, 1904). In these stories the author's aim was not to be engaged solely as a novelist, "but to portray to outsiders a phase of life unknown to the world at large, and to establish a folk-lore picture in which the scenes that occurred in times gone by, would be paralleled in the events therein narrated." Stringtown on the Pike is Mr. Lloyd's best known book, but Warwick of the Knobs is far and way the finest of the four.
Bibliography. The Bookman (May, 1900); The Outlook (November 16, 1901); The Bookman (December, 1910).
"LET'S HAVE THE MERCY TEXT"[34]
[From Warwick of the Knobs (New York, 1901)]
Warwick made no movement; no word of greeting came from his lips, no softening touch to his furrowed brow, no sparkle to his cold, gray eye. As though gazing upon a stranger, he sat and pierced the girl through and through with a formal stare, that drove despair deeper into her heart and caused her to cling closer to her brother.
"Pap, sister's home ag'in," the youth repeated.
"I know nothing of a sister who claims a home here."
Mary would have fallen but for the strong arm of her brother, who gently, tenderly guided her to a great rocking-chair. Then he turned on his father.
"I said thet sister's home agin, and I means it, pap."