“Garrison,” said George Thompson on the steamer which was conveying the Government party out of Charleston Harbor on their return trip; “Garrison you began your warfare at the North in the face of rotten eggs and brickbats. Behold you end it at Charleston on a bed of roses!” The period of persecution had indeed ended, the reign of missiles had ceased, but with the roses there came to the pioneer not a few thorns. Bitter was the sorrow which visited him in the winter of 1863; Without warning his wife was on the night of December 29th, stricken with paralysis, which crippled her for the rest of her life. No words can adequately express all that she had been to the reformer in his struggle with slavery. She was a providential woman raised up to be the wife and helpmate of her husband, the strenuous man of God. “As a wife for a period of more than twenty-six years,” he wrote her on the completion of her fiftieth year, “you have left nothing undone to smooth the rugged pathway of my public career—to render home the all-powerful magnet of attraction, and the focal point of domestic enjoyment—to make my welfare and happiness at all times a matter of tender solicitude—and to demonstrate the depth and fixedness of that love which you so long ago plighted to me. … Whatever of human infirmity we may have seen in each other, I believe few have enjoyed more unalloyed bliss in wedded life than ourselves.”