Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/182

144 these friends none were more devoted than the Phillipses, an excellent Quaker family. Mr. Thomas Phillips was a manufacturer of shoe-findings and lived with his family in Buffum street.

Mary Baker was very devoted to this elderly couple whom she called by the endearing names of “Uncle Thomas” and “Aunt Hannah.” Their home became a refuge to her in the summer of 1866. She did not live with them, but boarded with Mr. and Mrs. George D. Clark of Summer street. The Clarks lived in their own home, taking in boarders to increase their income. They were a kindly, social family. In their home Mrs. Patterson had solitude when she desired it, and a friendly democratic society when she felt the human yearning for sympathetic interest in other lives. For such independence and comparative comfort the charges were not heavy. Indeed she could not possibly have met them had they been so, for her purse was but scantily furnished at this time.

But to the Phillips home in Buffum street she fled for true social and spiritual companionship. They were of that excellent breeding which comes of true piety, and they cherished this stricken woman, too proud to admit herself desolate among strangers, as a very lamb of the Lord. Their aged mother lived with them. She was a saintly Quaker, who had passed her ninetieth year, and as the years rolled by and she lived on toward the close of her century of human experience, she grew weary of earth. She would sometimes say with gentle impatience, “I fear the good Father hath forgotten me.” One day