● ● ● habits began to reassert themselves. Mrs. Patterson tried to help him by Quimby’s method, but all she succeeded in doing was to feel his cravings in the same way as Quimby felt his patients’ sufferings. Again she had to appeal to Quimby to rid her of this unpleasant phenomenon as well as of “old habits, pain in the back and stomach, a cold just now, and billious.”106
The worsening state of her health drew her back to Portland in the summer of 1863. Because of the need to earn money she “essayed . . . to take notes for the Press . . . but was too ill for the enterprise,” as she later explained.107
Nevertheless an extract from her July journal was printed in the Portland Daily Press in October. Though obviously written as a potboiler, there is a sort of summer lightness about it that recalls the letters in which Mary Baker as a girl rattled along cheerfully with bits of neighborhood news:
July 20th. Rose at an early hour to look out upon the mist enveloping the slumbering city . . . A little later and the fog dispersed—the spires detached themselves from the mist, and Eastern Promenade sweeping round Munjoy’s Hill, lay, a glorious view, before me. The far-reaching, silvery sheen of waters—with its emerald isles laughing in sunlight—called Casco Bay, the ocean and rocky shores of the Cape, the sheltering headlands of Falmouth and Cumberland, were bathed in glory.
Ascending the Observatory on the summit of this Hill, 225 feet above tide water, we saw from the lookout a view which our limited space could portray but poorly . . .
A look at the inner harbor takes in the shipping, the spires, and shade trees of the embowered city. . . .
In the Natural History Room Science has a rich store-house and garniture of research. Collections of minerals, shells, birds, insects, reptiles, fossils, &c. . . . Some fine minerals in Calcite Malachite and marble, of the latter there were 50 varieties. The shells reminded ● ● ●