10, 1805. Forty years before, Daniel Palmer, his great-grandfather,
emigrated from Massachusetts and settled with three sons and a daughter
on the St. John River, in Nova Scotia. The daughter's name was Mary, and
it was she who was to be the future grandmother of our hero. One of the
neighbors of Daniel Palmer was Joseph Garrison, who was probably an
Englishman. He was certainly a bachelor. The Acadian solitude of five
hundred acres and Mary Palmer's charms proved too much for the
susceptible heart of Joseph Garrison. He wooed and won her, and on his
thirtieth birthday she became his wife. The bride herself was but
twenty-three, a woman of resources and of presence of mind, as she
needed to be in that primitive settlement. Children and cares came apace
to the young wife, and we may be sure confined her more and more closely
to her house. But in the midst of a fast-increasing family and of
multiplying cares a day's outing did occasionally come to the busy
housewife, when she would go down the river to spend it at her father's
farm. Once, ten years after her marriage, she had a narrow escape on one
of those rare days. She had started in a boat with her youngest child,
Abijah, and a lad who worked in her household. It was spring and the St.
John was not yet clear of ice. Higher up the river the ice broke that
morning and came floating down with the current. The boat in which Mary
Garrison and her baby rode was overtaken by the fragments and wrecked.
The mother with her child sought refuge on a piece of ice and was driven
shoreward. Wrapping Abijah in all the clothes she could spare she threw
him ashore. She and the lad followed by the aid of an overhanging willow
bough. The baby was unharmed, for she had thrown him into a snow-bank.
But the perils of the river gave place to the perils of the woods. In
them Mary Garrison wandered with her infant, who was no less a personage
than the father of William Lloyd Garrison, until at length she found the
hut of a friendly Indian, who took her in and "entertained her with his
best words and deeds, and the next morning conducted her safely to her