● ● ● reminiscences that the dispute was over a load of wood purchased by Patterson from Joseph Wheet but not paid for by him.
Cyrus Blood’s diary for February 29 states, without further explanation, “The Wheets were tried today.”90 But ironically enough, it was they who took possession of the house about a month later. Sometime in March, Abigail Tilton drove up to North Groton, collected her sister in her carriage, and drove her out of the village, as Joseph Wheet and his son tolled the bell of the village church in triumph. Patterson rather typically was away at the time. Myra Smith chose to stumble along behind rather than ride in the carriage and hear Mrs. Patterson’s sobs. The five years in North Groton had ended in total desolation and defeat.
Yet actually it marked the faint beginning of an upturn.91
Abigail Tilton drove her to the boardinghouse of Mrs. Lydia Herbert at Rumney Station, only six miles away, where Patterson had engaged quarters. After getting her settled, Mrs. Tilton, who was probably paying for the accommodation, left. The two newcomers were watched with avid interest by the other boarders, and gossip and speculation abounded as to Mrs. Patterson’s strange indisposition, the “spinal inflammation” which was said to be responsible for her sufferings. It was noted that she sometimes seemed more helpless when Daniel Patterson was there to carry her upstairs and down, and the knowing ones drew their thin-lipped conclusions as to that.92
She must have thought a good deal about the remarkable strength she was able to muster when she went to Patterson’s rescue in North Groton. Here was confirmation that a mental state could overcome a ● ● ●
90 [Cyrus Blood, entry for 29 February 1860, diary, 1924.002.0005, LMC.]
91 In her scrapbook is a newspaper clipping of a poem which she related stanza by stanza to specific years of her life. Opposite a stanza describing “the storm of sorrow” which extinguished once and for all the glory of life she wrote “1856.” This was the year young George Glover was taken away to Minnesota. The date “1859” was written opposite an almost equally dolorous stanza which, however, went on to say:
Let the present have its torture
And the past its store of ill,
To the Future—to the future
We will look with gladness still.
R. M. Charlton, “Life’s Memories,” in Mary Baker Glover, scrapbook, n.d., SB001, p.19, MBEL. The resilience of the lines matched the resilience of the verses which she soon began writing again.
92 Alfred Farlow, “Facts and Incidents Relating to Mrs. Eddy,” c. 1909, Subject File, Alfred Farlow - Manuscript - Facts and Incidents Relating to Mrs. Eddy (2 of 2), p. 196, MBEL.