Such was the woman who subsequently became the wife of Abijah Garrison, and the mother of one of the greatest moral heroes of the century.  Abijah followed the sea, and she for several years with an increasing family followed Abijah.  First from one place and then another she glided after him in her early married life.  He loved her and his little ones but the love of travel and change was strong within him.  He was ever restless and changeful.  During one of his roving fits he emigrated with his family from Nova Scotia to the United States.  It was in the spring of 1805 that he and they landed in Newburyport.  The following December his wife presented him with a boy, whom they called William Lloyd Garrison.  Three years afterward Abijah deserted his wife and children.  Of the causes which led to this act nothing is now known.  Soon after his arrival in Newburyport he had found employment.  He made several voyages as sailing-master in 1805-8 from that port.  He was apparently during these years successful after the manner of his craft.  But he was not a man to remain long in one place.  What was the immediate occasion of his strange behavior we can only conjecture.  Possibly an increasing love for liquor had led to domestic differences, which his pleasure-loving nature would not brook.  Certain it was that he was not like his wife.  He was not a man in whom the moral sense was uppermost.  He was governed by impulse and she by fixed moral and religious principles.  He drank and she abhorred the habit.  She tried first moral suasion to induce him to abandon the habit, and once, in a moment of wifely and motherly indignation, she broke up one of his drinking parties in her house by trying the efficacy of a little physical suasion.  She turned the company out of doors and smashed the bottles of liquor.  This was not the kind of woman whom Abijah cared to live with as a wife.  He was not the sort of man whom the most romantic love could attach to the apron-strings of any woman.  And in the matter of his cup he probably saw that this was what he would be obliged to do as the condition of domestic peace.  The condition he rejected and, rejecting it, rejected and cast-off his wife and family and the legal and moral responsibilities of husband and father.

Bitter days now followed and Fanny Garrison became acquainted with grief and want.  She had the mouths of three children to fill—­the youngest an infant at her breast.  The battle of this broken-hearted woman for their daily bread was as heroic as it was pathetic.  She still lived in the little house on School street where Lloyd was born.  The owner, Martha Farnham, proved herself a friend indeed to the poor harassed soul.  Now she kept the wolf from the door by going out as a monthly nurse—­“Aunt Farnham” looking after the little ones in her absence.  She was put to all her possibles during those anxious years of struggle and want.  Even Lloyd, wee bit of a boy, was pressed into the service.