● ● ●  Lady’s Book. Earlier verse was also receiving modest recognition. Her lines “To my Mother in Heaven” were reprinted in The Sunday-Book, an anthology published in New York for the “moral improvement” of children, and two earlier poems were picked up in Gems For You, an anthology of prose and poetry by New Hampshire authors.¹³¹

But a wry little verse which she wrote sometime before New Year’s Day, 1853, marks the beginning of an entirely new phase of her life. It was about something as trivial, and as exasperating, as a toothache. Melville had marked in Much Ado About Nothing Leonato’s observation to the effect that “there was never yet philosopher / That could endure the toothache patiently,” and he later wrote Hawthorne that a raging toothache was enough to demonstrate the nonsense of Goethe’s transcendental dictum, “Live in the all.”¹³² Mrs. Glover managed to be sufficiently philosophical about her toothache to make a joke of it and of the unfortunate fact that, once a tooth is drawn,

[Then] treacherous joy reveals the worthy crime
And gaping gums betray the tooth of time.¹³³

The important thing about this little sally is that it was enclosed in a letter she wrote her dentist, Dr. Daniel Patterson. Dr. Patterson had only lately come to live in Franklin, three miles from Sanbornton Bridge. He was a relative of Mark Baker’s second wife, and was thus acquainted with the Bakers socially as well as professionally. A letter Mrs. Glover wrote him in December, 1852, refers only to his professional services, but by the following New Year’s Day a sufficient friendliness had developed for her to send the poem, along with a book “selected  ● ● ●