Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/24

xiv that consciousness able to receive it. I shall concern myself only to report the truth.

In gathering the facts from the past I have often encountered the disappointments of imperfect memories of a small, a very small, group of men and women of advanced years who knew Mrs. Eddy in her youth; but the records in town books have yielded sufficient information to trace accurately Mrs. Eddy's residence from year to year. This data refutes certain unfounded assertions which float about as loose rumors, such as that related by an aged woman in Malden and printed in the form of an interview in the Boston Herald. This story was that a Mary Baker told fortunes by reading cards in a mean street in Boston before the Civil War, and had told this woman's fortune and she believed the fortune-teller to be Mrs. Eddy, the founder of Christian Science. In the late fifties Mrs. Eddy was no longer Mary Baker, but had been twice married. She was then Mrs. Patterson, an almost helpless invalid, living in North Groton, a village in Northern New Hampshire. She had not visited Boston for a long period of years and did not visit it for many years to come. Another rumor there was that a certain Mrs. Glover, who was a spiritualistic medium, in and around Boston during the sixties, could be identified with Mary Baker Eddy as one and the same individual. It is not necessary to discover who that Mary Baker was or who that Mrs. Glover, or to establish that they were individuals in nowise related to Mrs. Eddy. It is only necessary to tell minutely the facts of Mrs. Eddy's