Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/272

230 After she moved into her Broad Street house, Mrs. Eddy had a long succession of tenants and housekeepers, all of whom she at first found satisfactory, but against whom she soon had a grievance. She accused nearly all of them of stealing; of taking her coal, her blankets, her feather pillows, her silver spoons, and especially of taking her knives and forks, which kept magically disappearing like the food to which the clown sits down in the pantomime. It seemed as if the only way in which she could keep these knives and forks at all was actually to hold them in her hands. All this trouble she bitterly accredited to Kennedy. People came into her house well disposed toward her, she said; he set his mind to work upon their minds, and in a few days she could see the result. They avoided her, looked at her doubtfully, and her spoons and pillows began playing hide and seek again.

Mrs. Eddy talked of Kennedy continually, and often in her lectures she wandered away from her subject, forgot that her students were there to be instructed in the power of universal love, and would devote half the lesson hour to bitter invective against Kennedy and his treachery. This, of course, made an unfavourable impression upon new students, and Mrs. Eddy's advisers, Mr. Spofford, Mrs. Rice, and Miss Rawson, besought her to control her feeling and not to darken the doctrine of Divine love by the upbraidings of hatred. When thus advised she would tell her students how she had withdrawn herself from the world and laboured night and day through weary years, "standing alone with God," that she might give this great truth to men; and how Kennedy had perverted it and put it to evil uses. Not only did he rob her of her students and set