But amid labors so strenuous and uninterrupted the leader found opportunity to woo and win “a fair ladye.” She was a daughter of a veteran Abolitionist, George Benson, of Brooklyn, Conn., who with his sons George W. and Henry E. Benson, were among the stanchest of the reformer's followers and supporters. The young wife, before her marriage, was not less devoted to the cause than they. She was in closest sympathy with her husband's anti-slavery interests and purposes. Never had husband found wife better fitted to his needs, and the needs of his life work. So that it might be truly said that Garrison even when he went a-wooing forgot not his cause and that when he took a wife, he made at the same time a grand contribution to its ultimate triumph.
How did Helen Eliza Garrison serve the great cause? One who knew shall tell. He has told it in his own unequaled way. “That home,” he says, “was a great help. Her husband's word and pen scattered his purpose far and wide; but the comrades that his ideas brought to his side her welcome melted into friends. No matter how various and discordant they were in many things — no matter how much there was to bear and overlook-her patience and her thanks for their sympathy in the great idea were always sufficient for the work also. . . . In that group of remarkable men and women which the anti-slavery movement drew together, she had her own niche-which no one else could have filled so perfectly or unconsciously as she did. . . . She forgot, omitted nothing. How much we all owe her!” These were words
