She had, said one little girl who knew her a few years later, a “happy disposition” and was “always cheerful.”26 “We miss your good Cheer,” her mother wrote her when she was away from home, and a family friend added that they wished she was there “like Samson to mak[e] sport.”27 Her brother-in-law in 1848 wrote her: “I am . . . sorry to hear you say that you are not so lighthearted, gay and frolicksome as formerly. Keep up thy joyous spirits—drive care trouble and gloomy forbodings from thee, ever keep thy naturally lightsome feelings in the ascendent and my word for it you will yet again be the Mary with whom the hours passed pleasantly smoothly and happily away.”28
Even when years of struggle had brought a sadness to her eyes which troubled some who knew her, this was not the dominant impression she created. A man who frequently met her socially in 1865–66 described her as “bright and cheerful and very witty,” and one who was closely associated with her during the difficult years of the 1870s wrote, “I should say she was naturally joy-loving and lighthearted.”29 Dozens of people who knew her in her later years have borne witness to the infectious quality of her laughter.
A good deal of laughter rings through her early letters. “Her laugh was very sweet,” remembered one little girl who often heard Mary talking with her mother and laughing.30 Years later her nephew George W. Baker wrote to her granddaughter: “But she was a beautiful woman, and more beautiful when she laughed. I’ve read of ‘silvery’ laughs lots of times, but her’s came nearest to the realization of the novelistic description of anything in real life that I ever ran across.”31
26 Sarah Clement Kimball, recorded in Ruth W. Wardwell to The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1 February 1920, Reminiscence, p. 3, MBEL.
27 Abigail Ambrose Baker to Mary Baker Glover, 6 February 1844, 1919.001.0027, LMC; Mahala Sanborn to Mary Baker Glover, 6 May 1844, 1919.001.0007, LMC.
28 Luther C. Pilsbury to Mary Baker Glover, 17 May 1848, 1919.001.0028, LMC.
29 Edwin J. Thompson, recorded in John H. Thompson, “Report of John H. Thompson, a result of an investigation made in December, 1906,” c. 1907, Subject File, John H. Thompson, p. 19, MBEL; Samuel Putnam Bancroft to Mary Beecher Longyear, 22 August 1920 (archivist estimate), 1920.027.0001, LMC.
30 Sarah Clement Kimball, recorded in Ruth W. Wardwell to The Christian Science Board of Directors, 1 February 1920, Reminiscence, p. 3, MBEL.
31 George W. Baker to Mary B. G. Billings, 22 April 1924, Subject File, Mary Baker Eddy - Family - Glovers - Mary B. G. Billings - Correspondence with George W. Baker, 1918–1924, MBEL.