Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/281

Rh at ease, and, without asking him to come in, begged him to excuse her and ran back into the house. When she reappeared, she seemed even more distracted than before, and Mr. Spofford now felt sure that he had intruded upon some critical moment in preserve-making, and told her that he would call again when he next happened to be in Ipswich. He went away, leaving Miss Brown to wonder whether he had merely come to see how his victim did, or whether he had come to do her further harm.

By this time Mrs. Eddy had Mr. Spofford upon her mind almost as constantly as she had Richard Kennedy. In April, a month before the charge of witchcraft was made against him, Mrs. Eddy filed a bill in equity against Mr. Spofford to recover tuition and a royalty on his practice. This suit was still pending when the witchcraft case came up, and was dismissed June 3d because of defects in the writ and insufficient service. The Newburyport Herald of May 16th, in commenting editorially upon the witchcraft case, said: "Mrs. Eddy tried, some time since, to induce us to publish an attack upon Spofford, which we declined to do, and we understand that similar requests were made to other papers in the county."

In preparing to prosecute the witchcraft case, Mrs. Eddy first selected twelve students from the Christian Scientists' Association—she has always been partial to the apostolic number—and called on these students to meet her at her house and treat Mr. Spofford adversely, as other students had formerly treated Richard Kennedy. She required each of these twelve students, one after another, to take Mr. Spofford up mentally