Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/170

132 tied up with a string, which lay on her desk, and told Mrs. Clapp that it was her Bible, and that she had completed the Book of Genesis. Mrs. Clapp at that time copied for Mrs. Glover a bulky manuscript, which she believes was one of the early drafts of Science and Health. She recalls many passages, and remembers her amusement in copying the following passage, which now occurs on page 413 of Science and Health:

The daily ablutions of an infant are no more natural or necessary than would be the process of taking a fish out of water every day and covering it with dirt in order to make it thrive more vigorously thereafter in its native element.

After Mrs. Clapp had finished copying the manuscript, Mrs. Glover took it to Boston to find a publisher. Six hundred dollars, cash, in advance, was the only condition on which a publisher would undertake to get out the book, and Mrs. Glover returned to Stoughton and vainly besought Mrs. Wentworth to mortgage the farm to raise money.

Mrs. Glover's persistence was all the more remarkable in that the trade of authorship presented peculiar difficulties for her. Although from her youth she had never lost an opportunity to write for the local papers, and although when she first went to Dr. Quimby she introduced herself to him as an "authoress," her contributions in the old files of the Lynn papers show that she had had no training in the elementary essentials of composition. The quoted extracts from her written instructions to Mrs. Wentworth are indicative of her difficulties with punctuation, which was always a laborious second thought with her. From her letters and early manuscripts it is evident that lucid, clean-cut expression was almost impossible to Mrs.