Page:The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur).djvu/391

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THE LEADER IN RETIREMENT
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inspection of the domestic machinery, made affairs move with pleasant exactness. Miss Clara Shannon of Montreal was another inmate of the household who devoted special attention to Mrs. Eddy’s personal wants. Mrs. Pamelia J. Leonard, of Brooklyn, spent many months of several years at Pleasant View assisting in the work of church advancement, work which Mrs. Eddy never neglected. Mr. Frye continued in his faithful service of steward and secretary combined, and his duties were of the most diverse nature, varying from ordering supplies, keeping accounts, and transmitting Mrs. Eddy’s directions to her gardeners and coachman, to assisting in handling her heavy mail.

If Mr. Frye and Mrs. Sargent were the most constant of Mrs. Eddy’s attendants in her retirement, there were many other students called upon to serve their Leader, and such service was always regarded in the nature of an honor. There were many assistant secretaries and many assistant companions, but as to the personnel of that roll of honor it is not necessary to make any further statement than the plain and straightforward one once made by Mrs. Eddy, that no one was ever called to Pleasant View for discipline. They were called there because they had shown by their work elsewhere a high order of usefulness.

Mrs. Eddy maintained her habit of rising early through all the years of retirement. She rose about six o’clock in summer and before seven o’clock in winter. She had an hour for prayerful meditation three times daily, morning, noon, and night. In the