Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/140

102 retroactive, there is still another reason advanced. This reason, too, is given only by implication, but it is worthier of commendation than the former. The second reason is the illiteracy of Phineas Quimby, for which he was in no wise to blame, but which, as has been shown, prevented his accomplishing anything in the way of literature. The author made the journey in the depth of winter to the little town of Belfast, Maine, off the main line of travel and somewhat difficult of access, to see, as I supposed, the Quimby manuscripts. Arriving there the custodian of the manuscripts, George A. Quimby, said to me:

“If all the people who have come to see me in the past twenty years about these manuscripts of my father were fishes and were laid head and tail together they would stretch from here to Montana. If all the letters that have been written to me on the subject were spread out they would make a plaster that would cover the country.”

When I asked Mr. Quimby for permission to see these much-talked-of manuscripts, he took from a drawer in his desk a copybook such as school children use to write essays in. It was in a good state of preservation, not yellowed by age, and was written in from cover to cover in a neat copyist’s hand. There were no erasures, or interlineations, no breaks for paragraphs and very few headings. There were dates at the end of the articles, of which there appeared to be two or three different ones in the book. The dates were 1861 and 1863.

“Is this your father’s handwriting?” I asked Mr. Quimby.

“It is not; that is my mother’s, I believe, and here is one in the handwriting of one of the Misses Ware.”

Mr. Quimby went to a great iron safe in the wall of his office and brought out six or eight more books of a similar character. I glanced through the pages and saw that all were written in this style with some variation in the handwriting and then asked:

“Are none of these in your father’s handwriting?”

“No, they are all copies of copies. … These are the only manuscripts I have shown to any one and the only ones I will show.”

“But,” I objected, “there have recently been printed facsimile reproductions of your father’s manuscripts over the date 1863 in which appears the words ‘Christian Science.’ I particularly wished to see that manuscript.”

“I am showing you exactly what I showed others. That is the very page that was photographed.”

“And in whose writing is this?”

“My mother’s, I believe, or possibly one of the Misses Ware; … they are