● ● ● the Clement library; she would stand talking with Sarah’s mother, and her laughter would ring out. Toward night Sarah would see her working in the garden: “She always wore gloves with the finger tips cut off. I used to run across the road and hang over the gate and discuss things.” Mrs. Glover was always willing to talk, though she worked assiduously over her herbarium and the flowers were pressed, tabulated, dated, and pasted in an album.

The warm affection felt by the little girl for Mrs. Glover did not extend to Mrs. Tilton, who was also a handsome woman, she stated in her recollections, “but extremely determined and very fiery when angry.” Her “domineering nature” and “strong prejudices” made themselves keenly felt in her home and in the community. “Politics ran high at the time and the Tilton home was the center among the well educated folk of the day who gathered there to discuss the political situation and other current topics.”¹²⁸ In such an atmosphere it was inevitable that there should be clashes of conviction between the two sisters, as apparently there was over the issue of slavery.

Young Albert Tilton, who was not turning out too well, now had a sister, Evelyn, a sickly child. In March, 1853, Martha Rand Baker gave birth to a son, called George after his father, who was to play an equivocal role in Mrs. Glover’s later life.¹²⁹ But it was her sister Martha Pilsbury’s second daughter—the little namesake, Mary—who really engaged her affections. This diminutive Mary would come and sit at the edge of her bed when she was ill, and Mrs. Glover would draw from her laughing little presence the comfort she always seems to have found in the ingenuousness of children.¹³⁰

There was occasional literary activity through these years: poems in support of Franklin Pierce’s candidacy in the Patriot, a poem “Woman’s Rights” in Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion in February, 1853, and in the same month a poem “Lake Winnipiseogee” in Godey’s  ● ● ●