Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/409

Rh factory to the newspapers. The journal which had printed the disagreeable article was discredited. It had failed to substantiate the story that Mrs. Eddy was in feeble health, and could produce no one to bear it out in the statement that she was mentally incapable. Her home life was shown to be simple and her relations with the citizens of Concord open and honorable.

But one important circumstance of Mrs. Eddy’s life remained uncanvassed, her relation with her son, George W. Glover. Herein the New York newspaper which had aroused the recent inquiry thought it saw an opportunity to again challenge public attention and prove that the life upon which public scrutiny had been bent was not blameless. On Thanksgiving Day of 1906 a representative of the paper called on Mr. Glover in his home in Lead City, South Dakota, carrying a letter from Senator William E. Chandler of New Hampshire which stated that he had consented to act as legal counsel concerning certain questions which had arisen in connection with Mrs. Eddy’s life. In its subsequent story of the interview with George Glover, the newspaper stated frankly that it found the son a loyal champion of his mother, and that it was necessary to impress upon him his legal opportunity and to make him believe that his aid was necessary to extricate his mother from being “detained in the custody of strangers against her will.”

The clever New York newspaper man sat down in George Glover’s home, a home with which Mrs. Eddy had presented her son, and drew from the