Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/52

28 earning an honest penny among the village boys. One of these "boys" has described his experience to the writer. "Some days," he said, "Mrs. Glover was so nervous she couldn't have anybody in the room with her, and then I used to tie a string to the seat and swing her from outside her bedroom door." Mark Baker and John Varney were obliged often to carry her in their arms and walk the floor with her at night to soothe her excitable nerves, and when everything else failed, Mark used to send for old "Boston John" Clark to come and quiet Mrs. Glover by mesmerism. Clark was a bridge-builder from one of the villages up the valley who had acquired some reputation as a mesmerist, practising, like Dr. Ladd, upon any subject who was willing, and particularly happy when he dis covered a "sensitive" like Mrs. Glover. He never failed to soothe her, and after one of his visits, the Baker family enjoyed a space of quiet from the incessant turmoil of Mary's nerves. Yet Mrs. Glover was neither helpless nor incapacitated. She did not keep to her bed and she was able to go about the village and to attend to whatever she was interested in. Her neighbours remember her at church gatherings and at the sewing circle, where she went regularly although she did not sew. It was one of Mrs. Glover's notions, after her six months in Charleston, to imitate the Southern women in little matters of dress and manner, and at the sewing circle she sat and gave voluble descriptions of her life in the South and the favourable impression she had made there, deploring the loss of the daily horseback ride she had been accustomed to take in South Carolina.

Twice Mrs. Glover made an effort at self-support. While