● ● ● the shadow, but has a gold or reddish tint in the sunlight. Both she and Mrs. Tilton wore it looped up in ringlets, parted in the middle of the forhead and drawn toward the back of the head where it formed a cascade of curls. . . . She had beautiful eyes, bluish gray I should say . . . her teeth even, white and very lovely. . . . My uncle, who only died a few years ago, said that he used to sit in church without thinking of the service, his thoughts being busy contemplating Mrs. Glover’s beauty.62
This same witness also spoke of “gossip” and “silly stories” about Mrs. Glover which had wide circulation in the town—criticism, for instance, of the many visits to the Baker house by Dr. Rust, the young Methodist minister who was president of the seminary: “Mother said that no one who knew [Mrs. Glover] would dream of commenting upon [these visits], but the factory hands, a low lot themselves, made a great deal of it.”63 Mark Baker had been a trustee of the old Sanbornton Academy for eight years, his home was one where books were read, and it was natural enough that Rust should find it congenial. If he was in love with anyone, it was with the whole Baker family, as his published tribute to Mrs. Baker after her death makes clear.64
However, there were actual suitors to set tongues wagging. Particularly there was John H. Bartlett, formerly a student at the Sanbornton Academy and now at the Harvard Law School. From the early occasion in 1837 when he was groomsman and Mary Baker bridesmaid at a local wedding, he reappears from time to time on the scene. At one point he gave her the inevitable autograph album, and ● ● ●
62 Sarah Clement Kimball, recorded in Ruth W. Wardwell to The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1 February 1920, Reminiscence, pp. 2–3, MBEL. These also contain a description of the Reverend Corban Curtice, the Congregational minister who had replaced Enoch Corser in 1843: “He met with two accidents, injuring first one and then another of his legs. After that, when he would go up into the pulpit he would fling out one and then the other in such a funny fashion that we children enjoyed watching him. He sat on a high chair through his lengthy sermons and when he had sent everyone to hell he would weep, sadly out of the wrong corner of his eyes” (p. 7).
↑63 Sarah Clement Kimball, recorded in Ruth W. Wardwell to The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1 February 1920, Reminiscence, p. 6, MBEL [bracketed text Peel’s].
↑64 [(Richard S. Rust), “At Sanbornton Bridge, Nov. 21, Abigail A. Baker,” New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette, 6 December 1849, p. 3.] In 1902, after having lived for many years in Ohio, he returned east for the summer and paid a two-hour visit to Mrs. Eddy at her home in Concord.
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