Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/434

380 Mr. Glover's prolonged stay in Chelsea seems not to have brought him and his mother any closer together, for, almost immediately after his return to the West, Mrs. Eddy adopted a son who was presumably more to her liking.

Ebenezer Johnson Foster was a man of forty-one when Mrs. Eddy adopted him, and she herself was then in her sixty-eighth year. Dr. Foster was a homœopathic physician who had been practising his profession at Waterbury Center, a little mountain town in Vermont. Like most of Mrs. Eddy's disciples, he had led a quiet, uneventful life until he came under her influence. As a boy of fifteen he had enlisted in the Union Army and had served for three years. Later he was graduated from the Hahnemann Medical College in Philadelphia.

Dr. Foster first heard of Christian Science through William Clark, an old army comrade who believed that his health had been restored through his study of Mrs. Eddy's book. Dr. Foster decided to investigate this new system of healing, and, in the autumn of 1887, when he went to Boston to pay a visit to an old aunt, he called at Mrs. Eddy's house in Columbus Avenue and an interview was granted. The first impressions on both sides were very agreeable. Mrs. Eddy was more than eager to enlist the sympathies of "the M.D.'s," as she termed physicians, and she saw in Dr. Foster the tractable kind of man she was always looking for. She lavished her most gracious manner upon him, and he was led away captive in the first interview. It seemed to Dr. Foster that Mrs. Eddy was very like his own mother; that she was full of gentleness and sympathy and affection. She told him that she wished him to become her student, and he entered her class the following day.