Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/35

Rh and plain. A narrow door in the centre opens directly upon the stairway. On the left hand is a little parlour, lighted by two small-paned windows, and containing a corner fireplace. A larger room at the right, used as a granary by the present owner, was once the kitchen and living-room. Overhead there were three or four small sleeping-rooms. One wonders where the family of nine bestowed themselves when they were all in the house at once. The house has not been occupied for many years. The windows are boarded up, and it is desolate and forsaken. Yet it is not forgotten, for every summer Christian Scientists come to visit the spot where their leader was born. It is a shrine to the devout, who carry away stones and handfuls of soil and little shrubs, as souvenirs.

The Baker children were brought up like other farmers' families of that time and place. The older ones worked about the farm and in the house, and in the winter when farm work was "slack" they attended the district school. Lonely and unstimulating enough the life seems from this distance, but as a matter of fact it was useful and not uninteresting. It was before the days of steam railroads and the thousand modern aids to living, when every farmer's family was an industrial community in itself. All the supplies of the household, as well as food and clothes, were produced at home. Each man and woman and girl and boy of the farms was a craftsman, their daily work requiring physical strength and mental ingenuity and a kind of moral heroism. The school supplied their intellectual interests, the church satisfied their religious emotions, and for social diversion there were corn-huskings and barn-raisings and quilting-bees. The rest was hard labour.