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The Years of Discovery
Emergence: 1870 | page 382

● ● ●  flooding ahead of her pen. Sentences are chaotic, punctuation erratic, quotations inexact, meanings obscure. Despite the fact that the entire manuscript was rewritten and rearranged three times during 1873–74, each time being copied out afresh by George Barry, grammatical and literary niceties were notably missing from portions of it. One reason was that the author’s thinking was advancing by leaps and bounds even as she wrote; everything must be sacrificed to her developing ideas. The book was a textbook for living and was implicated in living.143

A letter which Mrs. Glover received from George Barry while she was writing her book illustrates the necessity that faced her. Barry was on vacation in Maine. He wrote of stopping first with an old coast pilot, an honest, plain-spoken man, who later took him across the Sheepscott River to Westport, with the wind tipping the craft on her side and showering them with spray. “Your boy looked like an old salt,” he wrote her, “with his Sou’ Wester and heavy overcoat on.”

Now he was stopping with a tough old farmer, “a fearful looking object” with “black hair and thick coarse black beard,” a perfect replica of “the engravings of the giants which Jack the Giant Killer  ● ● ●

143 Bancroft wrote to Mary Beecher Longyear on August 29, 1920, that 1872 to 1875 were Mrs. Glover’s “most trying years.” Samuel Putnam Bancroft to Mary Beecher Longyear, 29 August 1920, 1920.030.0001, LMC. She moved from house to house, driven on by the friction that almost inevitably seemed to arise in small-minded households after she had been there a while. The students alternately clung to her and turned on her. One student sued her in the Lynn Police Court to recover the $150 she had paid in advance for tuition. (Mrs. Glover failed to appear and judgment was rendered for the plaintiff.) Mrs. Glover herself filed suit for divorce from Daniel Patterson on October 6, 1873, and a decree was granted seven weeks later. On Thanksgiving Day of one of these years she wrote Bancroft:

They tell me this day is set apart for festivities and rejoicing; but I have no evidence of this except the proclamation and gathering together of those who love one another. I am alone today, and shall probably not see a single student. Family ties are broken never to be reunited in this world with me. But what of those who have learned with me the Truth of Moral Science; where do they find their joys; where do they seek friendship and happiness? Shall I see one of them today? . . .

Now, dear student, do you understand me? Do you think I want an invitation to dine out today? Oh no, you cannot so misconstrue the meaning; but I wish you all were awake in this hour of crucifixion, awake to the sense of the hour before you and the oil you need in your lamps at that coming of the Bridegroom.

[Bancroft, Mrs. Eddy as I Knew Her, pp. 16–17.]

George Allen told Georgine Milmine that the six months in 1873 when Mrs. Glover stayed with him and his wife were the worst he ever lived through, but her subsequent six-month stay with the Bancrofts was a happy one which had to be terminated only because of insufficient privacy to carry on her informal teaching and counseling. [George H. Allen interview, n.d., LSC004, MBEL.]