● ● ● characteristic liveliness, her yearnings and tribulations, her tentative steps forward and her persistent looks backward.140
With some zest she described her journey there, how at Wiscasset she “got into a villainous old vehicle and felt a sensation of being in a hen-coop on the top of a churn-dash for about 6 hours! when the symptoms began to subside, and so did the old cart” (March 31). On the journey she had met a Methodist lecturer who thought Quimby was “a defunct spiritualist,” but she had set him right in short order (April 5).
At Warren, too, she found that people thought her a spiritualist because they had heard that Quimby was one; so in order to disabuse them of that misconception she gave one or two lectures in the village on “P. P. Quimby’s spiritual Science healing disease—as opposed to Deism or Rochester-Rapping Spiritualism” (April 24). The first, she reported, was thinly attended, but the precious few “were those whom a lady present (the manufacturer’s wife) said were the uppertendam,” and she went on to describe it with a certain lightheartedness:
I began like unto this—Ladies & Gentlemen, ahem! To correct any misconceived ideas upon the subject we would first say—that a belief in Spiritualism, as defined by Rappings, trances, or any agency in healing the sick—coming from the dead, we wholly disclaim. I had no poetry at the close, ’twas all truth. (April 10)
The second lecture she changed to meet what seemed to her “a spiritual need of this people,” and she added, “I like much the hearts of Warren folks, i.e. better than their heads” (April 24).
Repeatedly her loneliness shows through. “I do not want to return to Portland to stop if I can avoid it,” she wrote. “If I could have my husband with me and be at home, I would like [it] there; but! but! but!” (March 31). And again; “I am a little bit lonesome, doing and suffering. Am wishing I was around the home hearth with my child and husband amid the joys of liberty” (April 24).
A distrust of her own capacities at that point is also evident. She had received a letter from the editor of The Independent asking her to ● ● ●
140 Mary Baker Patterson to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, 31 March, 5 April, 10 April, and 24 April 1864, P. P. Quimby Papers, LOC. [Text citations to these letters are provided throughout the following discussion.]