Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/47

Rh certain old manuscripts. She carried these down to the living room and there on occasions read from them various stories to the little girl.

These stories were of Washington, of Valley Forge, of the surrender of Lord Cornwallis, of the farewell of the commander-in-chief to his troops, and of the death and burial of the first American president. The stories made a deep impression on the child’s mind and she put many questions to her father concerning these events, causing the theme of the family conversation around the fireside to be set to a patriotic key.

“I remember,” says Mrs. Eddy in “Retrospection and Introspection,” written at least sixty years after these times, “reading in my childhood certain manuscripts containing Scriptural sonnets besides other verses and enigmas which my grandmother said were written by my great-grandmother. … My childhood was also gladdened by one of my grandmother Baker’s books, printed in olden type and replete with the phraseology current in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Among grandmother’s treasures were some newspapers yellow with age. Some of these, however, were not very ancient, nor had they crossed the ocean, for they were American newspapers, one of which contained a full account of the death and burial of George Washington.”

The grandmother cherished the idea that Hannah More was a relative in some way to her mother. She talked of the pious authoress and of the fact that her mother had written the manuscripts she