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But youth is stronger even than first love, and the widow who came to keep house for him had a grown daughter, a homely, good-hearted and simple-minded country lass; the natural result was that John Brown was married at the age of twenty to Dianthe Lusk, whom he describes as “a remarkably plain, but neat, industrious and economical girl, of excellent character, earnest piety and practical common sense.”^[7]

Then ensued a period of life which puzzles the casual onlooker with its seemingly aimless changing character, its wandering restlessness, its planless wavering. He was now a land surveyor, now a tanner and now a lumber dealer; a postmaster, a wool-grower, a stock-raiser, a shepherd, and a farmer. He lived at Hudson, at Franklin and at Richfield in Ohio; in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. And yet in all this wavering and wandering, there were certain great currents of growth, purpose and action. First of all he became the father of a family: in the eleven years from 1821 to 1832, seven children were born—six sons and one girl. The patriarchal ideal of family life handed down by his fathers, strengthened by his own saturation in Hebrew poetry, and by his own bent, grew up in his home.