● ● ● to a wider public. Together they considered the possibility of going into partnership in Boston or Lynn, he to do the healing part of the work, she the teaching.
On February 20, 1870, Kennedy signed an agreement: “In consideration of two years instruction in healing the sick I hereby agree to pay Mary M. B. Glover one thousand dollars in quarterly installments of fifty dollars commencing from this date.”164 But they were not quite ready to start. When Mrs. Glover left the Wentworths shortly afterwards, she went first for a six-week stay with Sarah Bagley at Amesbury, to give Kennedy a little more preparation for his public début and to fit Miss Bagley to carry on by herself after they had left.
This latter task was performed so well that for the rest of her life the good spinster supported herself very comfortably by her healing work. On April 23, 1870, she signed an agreement to pay Mrs. Glover 25 per cent of all the money she earned by healing, in return for the instruction she had received. Mrs. Glover later reduced the amount to 10 per cent, then still lower, and in 1876 the contract was canceled by mutual agreement.
Although Sarah Bagley stayed till the end of her days at what was still the pre-Christian Science stage of Mrs. Glover’s teaching, she maintained a sort of ambivalent gratitude and querulous loyalty to her teacher. Samuel C. Beane, who officiated at her funeral in 1905, wrote: “Miss B. always spoke kindly and amiably of Mrs. Glover to me.”165 Another close friend, H. G. Hudson, wrote: “She bought and gave away to as many people fifty copies of Science and Health and other publications of Mrs. Eddy’s. . . . She always quoted Science and Health in her practice which extended over twenty years [after its publication].”166
She was one of the many people who were to learn from Mary Baker Eddy at an early stage of the latter’s development and then show none of her remarkable capacity for growth, thus to be left behind like fossilized specimens of a dead-end species. Something of this effect marks ● ● ●
164 Richard Kennedy to Mary Baker Glover, agreement, February 1870 [Peel’s estimate: 20 February 1870], IC244.39.004, MBEL. This was later the basis of a lawsuit in 1878.
165 Samuel C. Beane to Alfred Farlow, 28 August 1905, Subject File, Alfred Farlow - Attacks on Mrs. Eddy, p. 8, MBEL.
166 H. G. Hudson to Alfred Farlow, 28 August 1905, Subject File, Sarah O. Bagley, MBEL [bracketed text Peel’s].