Love laughs at difficulties and delays, and in a few years after the Ballou emigration, Abram Garfield, a “stalwart” of the earlier and better kind, tramped his muddy way along the same roads, across the same rivers, and—strange, was it not?—to the very cabin where the emigrant wagon had stopped. Swift flew the shining days of courtship; and Eliza Ballou became Eliza Ballou Garfield, the mother of the President. Eliza Ballou was a lineal descendant of Maturin Ballou, a French Huguenot, who, about the year 1685, upon the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, fled from the smiling vineyards of France to the rugged but liberty-giving land of America. Joining the colony of Roger Williams, at Cumberland, Rhode Island, which had adopted for its principle “In civil matters, law; in religious matters, liberty,” he built a queer old church, from the pulpit of which he thundered forth his philippics against religious intolerance. The building still stands, and is a curiosity of architecture. Not a nail was used in its construction. For generation after generation the descendants of this man were eloquent preachers, occupying the very pulpit of their ancestor. Their names are famous. They were men of powerful intellects, thorough culture, and splendid characters. Their posterity has enriched this country with many distinguished lawyers, soldiers, and politicians. They were a superior family from the first, uniting to brilliant minds a spotless integrity, an indomitable energy, and the burning and eloquent gifts of the orator. The best known member of the family is Rev. Hosea Ballou, the founder of the Universalist Church in America, of whom Eliza Ballou was a grand-niece. He was a man of wide intellectual activity, a prolific and powerful writer, and made a marked impress on the thought of his generation. From this brief view of the ancestry of James A. Garfield, it is easy to see that there was the hereditary preparation for a great man. From the father’s side came great physical power, large bones, big muscles, and an immense brain. From the father’s line also came the heritage of profound conviction, of a lofty and resistless courage, which was ready anywhere to do and die for the truth, and of the exhaustless patience which was the product of ten generations of tilling the soil. On the other hand, the Ballous were small of stature, of brilliant and imaginative minds, of impetuous and energetic temperament, of the finest grain, physically and mentally. They were scholars; people of books and culture, and, above all, they were orators. From them, albeit, came the intellectual equipment of their illustrious descendant. From the mother, Garfield inherited the love of books, the capacity for ideas, the eloquent tongue, and the tireless energy. To the earnest solidity and love of liberty of the Welshman, Edward Garfield, mixed with the reflective thought of the fair-haired German wife, was added the characteristic clearness and vivacity of the French mind.