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The Garrisons had lived four generations in a little wooden house in East Twelfth Street, “a very pretty shanty” Martin called it, set back, with a garden, and a wooden fence to protect the lawn and flowers from passing vandals.

A portrait of the ancestor who founded the family fortune hangs today in our Museum. “Yan Geritsen, baker,” endowed with business sagacity, bought land under water in New Amsterdam for “thirty cents,” left it to his son, with orders not to sell. Succeeding generations drained and developed it. The name smelt of newly baked bread; it gradually evolved itself into Garrison. They were one of the fast disappearing families, who remained as they began—modest and thankful. They brought up their son with a sense of responsibility, as trustee for the coming son. There were no girls as far back as could be remembered; each family branch had one son. Floyd’s father, “Jimmy” Garrison, married a school marm. He became acquainted with her in Boston. She was very poor, but descended from the Aldens. Prudence Alden was a pale silent girl with a hidden fountain of irrepressible love in all its rare purity. Young Garrison’s friends couldn’t see what he saw in her.

Garrison had never been in business; he disliked the everlasting talk about money which was rapidly becoming God under the title of the “Almighty” dollar. He had many acquaintances and one faithful friend, Colonel Garland, a Southern gentleman, who had made a reputation “up North” as a corporation lawyer, when trusts were springing up over night like toadstools. The Colonel retained his sombrero, his soft accent, his passionate devotion to a few friends, and many women. When Jimmy Garrison put the administration of his estate into Colonel Garland’s hands, it was intact, just as his father had left it.

“Let us pull down those old hulks and build up warehouses,” said the Colonel. Garrison refused to consider that.

“The estate was not bought yesterday, for speculation. It has always brought us enough to live on modestly, and something over; if I get four per cent., I’m well satisfied.”

In time, modern buildings were erected on both sides of the Garrison “hulks,” which, although kept clean and in repair, had to be rented below the market value. Conservative policy has its good side; many went under in the frenzy of over-building. In such a young country the cult of silence, material rest, creative thought were as yet unknown; the man who did not create capital was considered an idler; Garrison continued to the end of his peaceful, worryless life, a gentleman.

The first realization of pain was the sudden death of his beloved Prudence; he had to live for his boy and looked about, seeking a sustaining force.

He rigged up a workshop in the top of his house, and took to modeling figures, which were very well done—every-day people he had known, the little Italian shoe boy, the newspaper woman, his friends, idealized of course, his wife in every mood, his boy. He was particularly successful with a smiling old Irishman, a pipe in his mouth, a hod on his shoulder, standing at the foot of a ladder looking upward. He called that figure “the Ancestor,” which title was a secret source of amusement to him, although he was too good-natured to say whose ancestor.

When asked the inevitable question,

“What business are you in, Mr. Garrison?”

Garrison would answer gravely,

“I muddle in clay.”