Norridgewock, he, with many others, was a guest at the annual church party at the home of Mr. Hathaway, the minister of the parish at Bloomfield. He had been told that he would find “a passel” of pretty girls there, and was advised that Margaret, the second, was especially beautiful. That was a fateful party! Out of it came the destiny of all the five daughters, for four of them married Bixbys and the fifth became foster mother to three of us children.
It was not the recommended, witty, black-eyed Margaret, however, who won the love of Llewellyn, but the oldest girl, tall, blue-eyed Sarah, whose name I bear. She captured his heart, and soon left Maine to go with him the long way, by Panama, to the distant ranch of San Juan.
What more natural than when, after a time, brother Jotham returned to his home, he should go over to the neighboring parsonage to bear the greetings of his sister-in-law, Sarah, to her family? It is told that, when upon this errand he met at the gate the lovely Margaret, he lost his heart completely. He never regained it. When he was eighty he told me emphatically that his wife not only had been the most beautiful woman in California, but that she still was.
A few months after this meeting Margaret traveled with friends across the Isthmus, and up the coast to San Francisco, there to be met by her sister and taken to San Justo to await her marriage day, which came shortly. She was married in her new home in old San Juan by the minister, Dr. Edwards, who had recently been a missionary among the Choctaw Indians. A
