Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/350

302 house, knocking at the doors of all the students, and calling to them to dress immediately and hurry down to Mrs. Eddy's room. After arousing the inmates of the house, he would hasten through the deserted streets, summoning one after another of the healers whom Mrs. Eddy considered most effective. When they arrived at the college, they would find a group of sleepy men standing in the hall outside Mrs. Eddy's door, talking in low tones. They were called, one by one, by Miss Bartlett or Mr. Frye, and admitted singly into Mrs. Eddy's chamber. Sometimes she lay in a comatose condition, and would remain thus for several hours, while each student, in his turn, sat beside the bed and silently treated her for about twenty minutes. He then left the room by another door than the one by which he had entered, and another student took his place. Again, the students would find Mrs. Eddy sitting up in bed, with a high colour, her hair in disorder, wringing her hands and uttering unintelligible phrases. On one occasion, when Mrs. Eddy was walking the floor with a raging toothache, metaphysical treatment was abandoned, and several of her students rushed up and down Tremont Street after midnight, trying to persuade some dentist to leave his bed and come to her relief.

In animal magnetism Mrs. Eddy found a satisfactory explanation for the seeming perversity of inanimate things. Mesmerism caused the water-pipes to freeze and the wash-boiler to leak. She was convinced that all the postal clerks and telegraph operators in Boston had been mesmerised, and on one occasion, when she was sending an important telegram to Chicago, she sent Luther M. Marston, one of her students, to