Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/208

168 went toward paying incidental expenses. After the first two meetings a number of Spiritualists were attracted to the services. In the discussions following Mrs. Glover's talks they asked questions which annoyed her, and she finally refused to continue her lectures and abolished public services.

Toward the end of the same year the book, Science and Health, made its first appearance in print. Mrs. Glover was Convinced that it was through this volume that she was to make her way, and that the most important task before her was to advertise it and push its sale. She accordingly entrusted this work to her leading practitioner and chief adviser, Daniel Spofford, persuading him to hand over his thriving practice to one of her new students, Asa Gilbert Eddy.

Mrs. Glover first met Mr. Eddy through Mr. Spofford, to whom Eddy had come as a patient. Although destined to become the husband of Mrs. Glover and his name to be indissolubly associated with Christian Science and made famous throughout two continents, this new student was personally unpretentious and had no suspicion of his future greatness. He was of humble origin, coming from the village of South Londonderry in the Green Mountains, where his father, Asa Eddy, was, according to his neighbours and friends, a hard-working, plodding farmer. His mother, Betsey Smith Eddy, was a more original character, and the children inherited many of her peculiarities. Farm life was not congenial to Mrs. Eddy or her children. Their tastes and inclinations were not for the established and the orderly, and they consequently had little or nothing to do with the routine work of either farm or house.