Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/51



HOUGH we instinctively give heredity and natural environment a close scrutiny, and in viewing a character are prone to believe these to be principal formative agents; we still fancy we behold how destiny strikes through circumstances, and grasping a life, drags it root and all from its soil and culture to replant it for its great development. We shall see how Love inspired Mary Baker and drew her tenderly out of Puritanism to fit her for leadership in a warfare against materialism.

All the Baker children went to school at the crossroads, about a mile from the farmhouse on the way to Concord. When Mary began her schooling, her oldest brother, Samuel, with New England pertinacity, had gone to Boston to learn the trade of mason, from which he steadily developed into a contractor and builder of considerable importance. He built many brick buildings and rows of houses which stood long in Boston. Her brother Albert entered Dartmouth College when Mary was nine and returned home when she was thirteen. He studied law with Franklin Pierce at Hillsborough, and later spent a year in the office of Richard Fletcher of Boston and was admitted to the bar in both Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The youngest