● ● ●  which joins with Tilton’s Winnepesaukee River to form the Merrimack. But we know little of their life.

Daniel Webster had been born in Franklin, and the local monument to him stands today across the road from the Pattersons’ unpretentious house, the upper floor of which they rented for a tailor shop. Nearby is the Christian Church which they attended, perhaps a compromise between their respectively Congregational and Baptist inclinations. A later minister of the church was Reverend Thomas Gannett Moses, whose son George was later to become a friend of Mrs. Patterson’s when he was a politically prominent Concord editor and she was Mary Baker Eddy, leader of a worldwide religious movement.

The most vivid glimpse we catch of her during her two years at Franklin is through the eyes of a twelve-year-old girl, Lucy Clark, who came to Patterson for some dental work. While he worked on her teeth, Mrs. Patterson sat in the window and read Ossian aloud to her. That wild, windy rhetoric, so alien to the taste of our own day, filled the little girl with a sort of spiritual exaltation, so much so that when she later went to Mount Holyoke College she started eagerly to read Ossian, then gave it up in dismay. This time there was no spiritual illumination.

Years later she heard Ossian read at Jackson, Michigan, with the same disappointing result. Still later in life she read Science and Health, completely unaware that the author was the Mrs. Patterson she had known, and instantly the illumination and exaltation she recalled from childhood were there again. When she later identified the author with her childhood friend, she wrote Mrs. Eddy telling her of the deep impression the long past incident had made on her, and even today it strikes a small match-flame in the darkness of the Franklin years.¹

Legend, busily supplying the deficiency of fact, has associated Mrs. Patterson with one “Boston John” Clarke who lived in Franklin. Clarke was both a brilliant (though untaught) hydraulic engineer and a locally notable mesmerist. Earlier in the Sanbornton days, when mesmerism was a novelty of unknown possibilities, Mrs. Patterson apparently met him on one occasion at Sarah Clement’s house and allowed him to experiment on her for the purpose of locating the body of a drowned  ● ● ●