● ● ●  cankered, and an ulcer collected on her lungs, causing the most severe distress you can conceive of; the physician with the family thought her cure impossible, but she has a good deal recovered for two weeks past, and this morning was carried out to ride.” After another three months she announced, “Mary’s health is gradually advancing on bread and water.”⁴⁰

This bleak diet was Mary’s lot during a good deal of her young womanhood as a feature of the Graham cure she had adopted. In the circumstances, it is surprising that her “silvery laughter” was heard as often as it was. She could even laugh ruefully about her suffering, as when she wrote Augusta, “Oh! the monotony of books, books, with an agreeable variety of pain.”⁴¹ It is perhaps not surprising that in another anthology which she acquired in her last years she should have marked the lines from Shelley:

Our sincerest laughter
With some pain is fraught.⁴²

At this stage her natural cheerfulness and hopefulness appear to have kept her from dwelling overmuch on her own or others’ illness. Four months before her uncle Philip Baker died in 1837 she wrote George: “We saw Uncle Baker not long since he is strangely altered and to appearance is wasting verry fast, enough enough of this.” A little later she was reporting: “Martha has been verry ill since our return from Concord. I should think her in a confirmed consumption if I would admit the idea, but it may not be so, at least I hope not.”⁴³

This attitude, prophetic of things to come, contrasts with Abbie’s “realism” and Albert’s anxious solicitude. In a letter in 1837 Abbie wrote: “Mary spent the last week with me and appears quite comfortable, but the poor girl can never enjoy life as most of us can should  ● ● ●