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