Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/66

34 called, threshed out the old philosophic speculations without rancor or irritation.

He was a fine-looking old Calvinist, with leonine head covered with a mane of silver, and shaggy brows beneath which rolled eyes of eloquence and compassion. His mouth was wide but firm, suggesting both humor and melancholy. His shoulders had the scholar’s droop. One can picture them of a fine summer evening, the slender girl and the old scholar, on their usual promenade in the garden. She must have declared to him something from her philosophy, — perhaps that one drop of divine love melted his eternal hells. As she looked up at her pastor, her great blue eyes poured sunshine upon him and she smiled with such radiance that he was struck dumb in the midst of his defense of Hades. They would be by the willows which long remained a vital relic of the old place, and below them rolled the valley with the village nestling there in the summer twilight.

“Mary, your poetry goes beyond my theology,” cried her pastor; “why should I preach to you!”

As they turned they encountered his son Bartlett and Abigail; for Bartlett was a suitor for Abigail’s hand and she once pinned a rose on his coat in this garden. It is possible that both men were uplifted as they walked down the hill from the Baker home, and that it was then the father, halting his son with a hand on his shoulder, declared to him what he at some time certainly said: “Bright, good, and pure, aye brilliant! I never before had a pupil with such depth and independence of thought. She has some