life which are exclusive of all practices of charlatanism, and are at all times stainless and honorable.
All statements of facts made in this narrative are founded on reliable evidence, town registers, church books, and court records. As to the memories of a few old people interviewed by the author, who associated with Mary Baker in her youth, it must be said that they were not always all that could be desired, and it is fortunate that public records can usually be depended upon to rectify careless assertion. Compared together these memories sometimes contradicted each other; referred back to themselves, they frequently shifted and showed instability; and a deplorable thing was that they betrayed evidence of having been tampered with by suggestion, the imagination having been incited by vanity or cupidity.
To remember a thing suggested, with a gift in full view, is a natural enough performance to children and to those in second childhood. But what should be said of the bribers in such a case? It is to the honor of human nature that both men and women have resisted the offer of large sums of money to remember that which would have been convenient to the theories of malicious-minded critics who preceded me in their investigations.
So if the intelligence was sometimes staggered in the search for the truth about this illustrious woman by encounter with malicious inventions, clearly discernible because of the known facts, the provable facts, which correct them, it was also frequently cheered and uplifted by touching the store of thought emanating from persons “whose spirits and
