Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/296

254 man, Sargeant, had been employed by some one as an actor in a farce rather than a tragedy.

At the preliminary hearing in the municipal court of Boston there was a strange assemblage of witnesses brought to swear against the liberty of the teacher of moral science, Mr. Eddy, and his student, Edward Arens. The two men who had been summarily arrested and haled to court were astounded to behold Daniel Spofford in such a company. Besides Sargeant, the saloon-keeper of Sudbury street, there were his sister, who kept a house of ill-fame at 7 Bowker street, and several women inmates of this house; also George Collier, Sargeant’s accomplice, who was under bonds awaiting trial on some charge of evil doings of his own; Jessie MacDonald, a discharged servant from Mrs. Eddy’s household; and the detectives employed on the case, Hollis C. Pinkham and Chase Philbrick, were of the company.

Sargeant, with bold effrontery, professed to identify Mr. Eddy and Edward Arens as “Miller and Libbey.” He then told a long and vivid story of his meetings with them, — how they had come into his saloon one morning and told his fortune and then, getting into confidential conversation, had asked him if he knew any one who could be hired to put a man out of the way; how he had said that he was ready himself for any such job, provided there was money in it; and how by arrangement he afterward met Mr. Eddy and Mr. Arens on the railroad track in East Cambridge on the seventeenth of August at five-thirty o’clock in the afternoon. There, he declared, being somewhat alarmed for himself, he had