Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/339

Rh Mr. Buswell and Miss Alice Sibley, went to Mr. Buswell's old home at Barton, Vt., to spend the remainder of the summer. Mr. Buswell asserts that Mrs. Eddy was in an excessively nervous and exhausted condition, approaching nervous prostration, and that he was called up night after night to treat her for those hysterical attacks from which she was never entirely free. But, however ill she might have been the night before, each day found her planning for the future of her church and college, arranging for lectures to be given by her students, looking about for new practitioners, and tirelessly devising means to extend the movement. She knew that a practical reconstruction of her household would now be necessary, and began casting about in her mind for such of her students as could be counted upon to devote themselves unreservedly to her service. In one of her selections, certainly, she was not mistaken. On the day they started back to Boston, Mrs. Eddy asked Mr. Buswell to telegraph Calvin A. Frye, a young machinist of Lawrence, Mass., who had lately studied with her, to meet them at Plymouth, N. H. One is tempted to wonder what Mr. Frye would have done, when this message reached him, had he known of what it was to be the beginning. From the day he joined Mrs. Eddy at Plymouth, and returned to Boston with her, he has never left her. Having entered Mrs. Eddy's service at the age of thirty-seven, he is now a man of sixty-four, and is still at his post.

For twenty-seven years Mr. Frye has occupied an anomalous position in Mrs. Eddy's household. He has been her house-steward, bookkeeper, and secretary. When he attends her upon her ceremonial drives in Concord, he wears the livery of