Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879; the story of his life told by his children: volume 3

[428] occupation have prevented my writing to you earlier. His death was very sudden and unexpected, although his strength had been failing since his return from America, and the loss of my dear mother was a shock from which he never entirely rallied. . . .

And now, dear sir, I scarcely know how to express to you and to Mrs. Garrison, and to Mr. H. C. Wright (and, indeed, to all his American friends), the obligations that his children feel towards you who did so much for him when prostrated by illness in America. To visit your country had long been his wish. He accomplished his desire when quite unequal to the exertion, but he always felt gratified to have seen America, the ‘land of his love.’ The last time I saw him, he spoke of you and your family, and playfully he has expressed himself sometimes in speaking of the continued hospitalities almost heaped upon him. ‘As for Garrison, he would, if he had had his own way, have killed me with kindness, but Mrs. Garrison, with her¹ kindness, would have brought me to life again.’² H. C. Wright, he said, had nursed and attended and cheered him as ‘a woman would have done’; and repeatedly he has said how gratified he should be to return in any way to your friends some portion of the kindness which was shown to him by all in America. Will you bear us in mind, dear sir, and give us some opportunity of so doing, and feel that, in doing so, you will add yet another obligation to the many for which we are indebted to you and to America?

The home in which Ashurst had been an honored guest, was in Dix Place, near Hollis Street, whither the³ Garrison family had removed in 1853 from Concord Street, on Boston Neck—their residence for a year after quitting Shawmut Avenue. In the heart of the city, and very⁴ accessible, it drew upon the anti-slavery leader and his wife a great deal of company, to entertain which was no small tax on their slender resources.⁵ Hitherto, Francis