Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/487

Rh house and went to Maine with her in the summer; they sat spellbound at her lectures, and put their time and goods at her disposal.

Mrs. Woodbury's group of students and followers were, on the whole, very different from the simple, rule-abiding Christian Scientists who had been taught directly under Mrs. Eddy's personal supervision. Mrs. Eddy's own people never got very far away from her hard-and-fast business principles, while Mrs. Woodbury's students were distinctly fanciful and sentimental, and strove to add all manner of ornamentation to Mrs. Eddy's stout homespun. There were two or three musicians among them, and a young illustrator and his handsome wife, and most of them wrote verses. Some of Mrs. Woodbury's students went abroad with her, and acquired the habit of interlarding the regular Christian Science phraseology with a little French. Mrs. Woodbury and her students lived in a kind of miracle-play of their own; had inspirations and revelations and premonitions; kept mental trysts; saw portents and mystic meanings in everything; and spoke of God as coming and going, agreeing and disagreeing with them. Some of them affected cell-like sleeping-chambers, with white walls, bare except for a picture of Christ. They longed for martyrdom, and made adventures out of the most commonplace occurrences. Mrs. Woodbury herself had this marvel-loving temperament. Her room was lined with pictures of the Madonna. When she went to Denver to lecture on Christian Science in 1887, her train was caught in a blizzard; in relating this experience, she describes herself as "face to face with death." Her two children fell into the water on the Nantasket coast; Mrs.