● ● ● later sang, and perhaps for the first time in her life Mary was able to go to the theater. Her contributions to the local papers include an ecstatic review of The Death of Rolla as performed there.149
Also, there were trips—one in particular up the Cape Fear River to Fayetteville with a Mrs. Cook.150 A Fayetteville friend of Mrs. Cook’s, a Mrs. Charles Smith, gave a dinner party for her, and years later a venerable old lady who had been invited to the party to meet her recalled her as “a very beautiful woman, brilliant in conversation, and most gracious in her manner.”151
In Wilmington the Glovers attended the Episcopal Church. In later years Mrs. Eddy told of how she had missed the simple New England services of her youth and how, in an effort to find that simplicity, she persuaded her husband to take her to a Negro church one Sunday. But the emotionalism she found there was as strange to her as the ritualism of the Episcopalians.152
Everywhere, of course, she was confronted with the fact of slavery. Among the marked passages in her Lindley Murray Reader are the lines of Cowper:
[Man] finds his fellow guilty of a skin
Not colour’d like his own; and having pow’r
T’ inforce the wrong, for such a worthy cause
Dooms and devotes him as his lawful prey.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I would not have a slave to till my ground,
To carry me, to fan me while I sleep, ● ● ●
149 “Originals,” source dated 1 June 1844, copied in Mary Baker Glover, copybook, A09002, p. 41, MBEL.
150 There she was undoubtedly shown the house where Flora MacDonald lived when she came from Scotland with her memories of Bonnie Prince Charlie, a romantic Jacobite story to stir even a romantic daughter of the Covenanters.
151 Recorded in Elizabeth Earl Jones, “Mrs. Eddy in North Carolina and Memoirs,” c. 1938, Reminiscence, p. 59, MBEL (quoting an account given by Miss Rebecca Hodges of Fayetteville to Sue Harper Mims, in 1909).
152 Elizabeth Earl Jones, “Some Data Pertaining to Mary Baker Eddy in Charleston, S.C.,” September 1941, Reminiscence, pp. 35–36, MBEL.