Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/329

Rh father, Enoch Frye, prepared for college in Phillips Andover Academy and graduated from Harvard in the class made famous by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Calvin Frye received his education in the district school of Frye village. His father was in moderate circumstances, having contracted a lameness which unfitted him for active life work, and it was not possible for him to educate his sons as he had himself been educated. There were five children of Calvin’s generation, a brother who died in infancy, one who lost his life in the Civil War, another who was a business man of Boston, and a sister who with Calvin became a Christian Scientist.

Calvin married at the age of twenty-eight, but his wife lived only a year after the marriage and they had no children. He thereafter lived at home with his parents and sister in Lawrence, working in the Natick mill as an overseer of machinery. His family all belonged to the Congregational church, his father and grandfather before him having been members of the choir. For fifteen years Calvin was an active church-worker, librarian, class leader, and usher. He and his sister Lydia became interested in Christian Science at the same time through Mrs. Clara Choate who carried the new teaching into Lawrence. She healed a relative of the Frye family and was then invited to their home.

Mr. Frye’s mother had suffered from mental derangement for many years and Mrs. Clara Choate restored her to sanity which continued for four years, when under a sudden return of her malady she expired. But her marvelous restoration made firm