her mother. She was born July 16, 1821, in the little country community of Bow, on the Merrimac river, in the State of New Hampshire. Naught can be said against the Baker blood, enriched as it was by a strain from old Scotland. The stock was unquestionably good, developed out of the sternest and sturdiest of New England stuff. For half a dozen generations the Bakers had lived and moved and had their being in New England. They were not unlike their neighbors, thinking the same thoughts, striving for the same ideals, clearing the land, tilling the soil, fighting back the savages, fearing and worshipping God, and educating their children. Mark Baker was a distinguished character in the community where he lived. He was justice of the peace, a member of the school board, an officer in the local Congregational Church, and the strongest and stiffest kind of a Calvinist! From her earliest years Mary was bitterly opposed to her father's Calvinistic interpretation of Scripture, and Sibyl Wilbur never misses the opportunity to take a fling at the stern and uncompromising old man because of the same fact.

Several characteristics developed early in life and became more and more accentuated as she grew older. She was a dreamer, but a kind of curiously confused method seemed to be present in all her dreaming. She was not especially peculiar save as she and others began to place emphasis upon her peculiarities. The key word to her whole life from start to finish is selfishness. She was, first, last and always, amazingly, tremendously, beyond all power to define or describe, selfish! And a sidelight upon the same undesirable characteristic was a surpassing vanity. If the tales

told by her friends and herself are true, she early developed a species of spiritual vanity that shrouded her with an atmosphere of strangeness, if not of mystery. For a whole year, she declares she heard voices. At frequent intervals she heard her name called, and thrice repeated, even as Samuel was called. She had never heard the story of Samuel, so she says, although an intense lover of the Bible and Bible stories, and her mother, a godly woman of the old school, and brought up on the Scriptures! The explanation is not far to seek and is most easy. She magnified and embellished a simple and childish experience to pave the way, in the minds of the credulous, for the alleged greater and more persistent voices of 1866!

To be unlike other people, and thereby to attract attention and admiration to herself, seemed to be one of the chiefest ambitions of her life. She never dressed as others did, but always in good taste. She is described as being dainty and beautiful, possessed of a fine figure, and her comeliness of feature and form not deserting her even in her old age. One of her most decidedly practical and valuable assets was her big, gray eyes, overshadowed, as they were, by long, dark, and drooping lashes. McClure's magazine for January, 1907, quotes a neighbor as saying, “When she was angry they became fairly black." If this be true, then black must have become in after years almost their normal color! But the crowning glory of her unbridled vanity was her hair, wavy brown, and folds upon folds of it. In this she took the greatest possible pride. Her walk has been described by those who knew her well in those days as being "mincing and artificial," and it has not been recorded that there

ever was an effort at reformation in this respect. The people of the community where she grew up have never forgotten how she tripped into church, almost invariably late, after all others had been seated, and marched well up to the front, dressed, as always, in a conspicuous manner. She was the cynosure of all eyes, and she knew it, and timed her arrival and entrance so that it should be so! To the last she would enter a room, even on ordinary occasions, in a manner altogether sui generis. Artificiality for the sake of effect was studied so long and practised so faithfully that at last it became a second nature with her.

In a family and on a farm where everybody was supposed to take some helpful part in the strenuous activities of all, we find that Mary consistently avoided everything but idleness and ease. She folded her hands and played lady, and the rest of the family allowed it to be so. She usually managed to have her own way in everything. If right of way was denied her, or even questioned, a scene generally followed. She was extremely nervous, and when excited, would pitch forward on the floor and kick and scream, just like many another high-tempered and uncontrolled child that badly needed the wholesome treatment precribed by Scripture. Sometimes she would become perfectly rigid and the family physician would often have to be called in. The family spoke of these seizures as "spells," while the unsympathetic and unsanctified neighbors called them "fits," or even "tantrums." It is fairly dreadful that her own father, worn out with her temper and her tantrums, felt moved to say, as quoted again from McClure's Magazine, January,

1907, "The Bible says Mary Magdelene had seven devils, but our Mary has got ten," and, most sad to relate, they were never cast out, as they unquestionably were from the New Testament Mary! According to McClure, as above, Dr. Ladd, the family physician, sometimes diagnosed these spells as "hysteria mingled with bad temper." The unseemly physical demonstrations which usually accompanied these hysterical outsbursts were somewhat modified in after years, while the mental phenomena remained practically unchanged. Restive under authority in the home, and indolent and apparently incapable of concentrated and sustained thought at school, what little time she attended school, it is not surprising that she entered upon the duties of life, as a young woman, practically without an education. Her boastful statement that she "graduated from Dyer H. Sanborn's Academy at Tilton" is a joke, since it appears there never was such an "Academy."

She was surpassingly shrewd. To cover up her woeful want of a knowledge of books, especially grammar, she secured the following heavenly and most convenient revelation, and gleefully wrote it down in "Retrospection and Introspection:" "After my discovery of Christian Science most of the knowledge I had gleaned from school books vanished like a dream. Learning was so illumined that grammar was eclipsed." It is Iwell she has told us this. We were conversant with the fact, but were not infallibly informed as to the modus operandi. Now we know, for she has told us, that her education or knowledge was as purely an imaginary quantity as was everything else with her, saving, of course, the universal exception of-filthy

lucre! She was as innocent of the rules of punctuation, capitalization, and of grammar in general, as a six or seven-year-old child. If her books had been published from her manuscripts, without the mind and hand of some trained censor to touch them up, change them, and, in part at least, redeem them, they would have become the laughing stock of a few years and then would have passed out forever. Her letters alone prove that she scarcely had the decent suspicion of a common-school training in the merest rudiments of an education.

By her marriage to George Washington Glover, December, 1843, she recorded the first change in her name. After seven months of married life she came back to her father's house a widow, twenty-three years of age, and for some years was known as Mrs. Mary Baker Glover. In September her only child was born, and to him she gave his father's name. Many excuses have been offered for what followed, but after all has been said, it remains that she practically abandoned this child to the keeping and training, for weal or for woe, to the hearts and hands of others. The separation was permanent, for she never brought him back to his proper place in her life, enthroned in her heart and cared for in her home.

For one who did not believe in marriage it must be admitted on all sides that she gradually became most wonderfully proficient in the art. It appears that she added another section to her name about every opportunity that presented itself. Nine years after the death of George Washington Glover another metamorphosis took place in her name, and now she began to write it Mary Baker Glover Patterson. She says herself of