CHAPTER III
EDUCATION AND DEVELOPMENT
THOUGH we instinctively give heredity and natural environment a close scrutiny, and in viewing a character are prone to believe these to be principal formative agents; we still fancy we behold how destiny strikes through circumstances, and grasping a life, drags it root and all from its soil and culture to replant it for its great development. We shall see how Love inspired Mary Baker and drew her tenderly out of Puritanism to fit her for leadership in a warfare against materialism.
All the Baker children went to school at the
crossroads, about a mile from the farmhouse on the way
to Concord. When Mary began her schooling, her
oldest brother, Samuel, with New England
pertinacity, had gone to Boston to learn the trade of
mason, from which he steadily developed into a
contractor and builder of considerable importance. He
built many brick buildings and rows of houses
which stood long in Boston. Her brother Albert
entered Dartmouth College when Mary was nine and
returned home when she was thirteen. He studied
law with Franklin Pierce at Hillsborough, and later
spent a year in the office of Richard Fletcher of
Boston and was admitted to the bar in both
Massachusetts and New Hampshire. The youngest
