Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/310

266 how Bronson Alcott, after reading Science and Health, had said that no one but a woman or a fool could have written it.

At this time the skeleton in the house was still Malicious Mesmerism. Ever since his arrest upon the charge of conspiracy to murder, Mr. Eddy had seemed stupefied by fear, and he went about like a man labouring under a spell. He was trying to teach a little, but said that the mesmerists broke up his classes. He had a tendency to brood upon the few things in which he was interested at all, and he used to become deeply despondent, confiding to the loyal students his fear that the work would be utterly broken down and trampled out.

Mrs. Eddy was nervous about her mail, and believed that her letters were intercepted. When she wrote letters now, she had one of her students take them to some remote part of the town and drop them into one of the mail-boxes farthest away from her house. She believed that the mesmerists kept her under continual espionage, and she seldom went out of the house alone. When Mr. Eddy got home after a trip to Boston, ten miles distant, she would embrace him and thank God that he had escaped the enemy once again. Mrs. Eddy's heaviest cross was that the mesmerists were apparently triumphant. She was greatly chagrined by the fact that Richard Kennedy had been able to build up a practice in Boston, and his prosperity hurt her like a personal affront. He had stolen his success, she said. Within a year after the conspiracy trouble, Edward Arens also incurred her displeasure, and she added him to the list of mesmerists. She kept photographs of Kennedy, Spofford, and Arens in her desk, Kennedy's picture marked with a black cross, and the other two marked with red