Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/278

236 from her worst attacks and was supposed to be helpless in bed, she was occasionally discovered late at night, slipping about the house and "tidying up" under cover of darkness.

Before Miss Lucretia knew Mrs. Eddy and Miss Rawson, she was a Congregationalist, but after she was healed by Christian Science she withdrew from her old church. Her cure was much talked about. After she was treated by Miss Rawson, she was able to be up and about the house all day and to walk a distance of two or three miles, whereas before she had made much ado to call upon a neighbour at the other end of the Green. After her healing she made some effort to practise upon other people, but Ipswich folk were slow to quit their family doctors in favour of the new method.

Miss Brown, however, remained a devout Scientist until her death in 1883, and up to that time occasionally took a case. The story goes that she got the cold she died of by airing the house too thoroughly after having treated one of her patients. Fifty years of frantic cleanliness were not to be overcome in an instant; and although Miss Lucretia well knew that disease was but a frame of mind, that contagion was a myth, and that dirt itself was only a "belief," the moment a patient was out of the house, up went the windows, and the draperies went out on the clothes-line.

In her last illness she called in her old family physician, but refused to let him prescribe for her, explaining that she merely wished him to diagnose her case so that her Christian Science healer would know what to treat her for. Her death was as orderly as her life. When she felt that her "belief" (pneumonia) was gaining on her, she called in her mother and