Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/41

Rh was such a big girl to be in our class. I was only nine, but I helped her with her arithmetic when she needed help. We studied Smith's Grammar and ciphered by ourselves in Adams's New Arithmetic, and when she left school in three or four weeks we had both reached long division. She left on account of sickness.

"I remember what a pretty girl she was, and how nicely she wore her hair. She usually let it hang in ringlets, but one day she appeared at school with her hair 'done up' like a young lady. She told us that style of doing it was called a 'French Twist,' a new fashion which we had never seen before. In spite of her backwardness at books she assumed a very superior air, and by her sentimental posturing she managed to attract the attention of the whole school. She loved to impress us with fine stories about herself and her family. The schoolgirls did not like her, and they made fun of her as schoolgirls will. I knew her for a long time afterward, as we grew up in the same village, but I can't say that Mary changed much with her years."

Mrs. Eddy's own story of her early education should also be considered. In her autobiography, Retrospection and Introspection, she says that she was kept out of school much of the time because her father "was taught to believe" that her brain was too large for her body; that her brother Albert taught her Greek, Latin, and Hebrew; and her favourite childhood studies were Natural Philosophy, Logic, and Moral Science. From childhood, too, Mrs. Eddy recalls, she was a verse-maker, and "at ten years of age I was as familiar with Lindley Murray's Grammar as with the Westminster Catechism;