Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/197

Rh of mental healing, and at one time had offices in Boston, Haverhill, and Newburyport, dividing his time among the three places. Spofford was one of the most interesting of Mrs. Glover's students and an important factor in the early development of Christian Science. He was born at Temple, N. H., and when he was a boy of ten came to eastern Massachusetts with his brother and widowed mother. He was put out to work for farmers about the country, and, although he was a frail boy, he did a man's work. He was working as a watchmaker's apprentice when, in his twentieth year, he entered the army. He enlisted in '61 and served in the Army of the Potomac, in Hooker's brigade, until he was mustered out in '64, taking part in some twenty engagements, among them Gettysburg and the second battle of Bull Run. On his return from the army he went to work in a shoe factory in Lynn. He first met Mrs. Glover in 1871, when she was with Richard Kennedy, and he had access, through another student, to the manuscripts from which she taught. During the next three years, which he spent in the South and West, he carried these manuscripts with him and studied them. He was thoughtful and reflective by nature, and even when he was a chore boy on the farm he read the Bible diligently and went about his work in the barn and in the field, pondering deeply upon the paradoxes of the old theology. He had worked out a kind of transcendentalism of his own, and he found something in the Quimby manuscripts which satisfied a need of his nature. When he came back to Lynn, in the spring of 1875, he began to experiment among his friends in the healing power of this