Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/120



N order to understand what sort of meeting it was which took place between the emaciated sufferer and invalid, Mary Baker, and the mesmeric healer, Phineas Quimby, at the International Hotel in Portland, Maine, in October, 1862, it is necessary to survey briefly the latter’s life and work up to this period.

Quimby was the son of a poor blacksmith and was apprenticed as a lad to a clock-maker. He had no schooling and grew up illiterate but industrious and honest. He made with his own hands hundreds of clocks and having his interest thus awakened in mechanics, tinkered with small inventions, and is said to have perfected a number of tools, especially a hand-saw. Part of the time he earned his living making daguerreotypes.

Thus he lived until he was thirty-six years old, a nervous, shrewd little man with a piercing black eye and determined mouth. He was argumentative and somewhat combative, inquiring, inventive, and doggedly determined. These traits were partially due to lack of education; to him an axiom was not a self-evident proposition; he refused to accept anything as a truth unless he could experiment with it and prove it for himself. He was not religious, but