Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/36

The qualities of Mark Baker were transmitted to his children. They were all high-tempered and headstrong and self-assertive, and they did not lack confidence in themselves in any particular. At home, however, they were trained to obedience and up to the time at least of the birth of his youngest daughter, Mark Baker was master in his own house. But from the beginning it was evident that special concessions must be made to Mary. She was named for her grandmother, who made a pet of her from the first, and no doubt helped to spoil her as a baby. Mrs. Baker, the mother, often told her friends that Mary, of all her children, was the most difficult to care for, and they were all at their wits' ends to know how to keep her quiet and amused. As Mary grew older she was sent to district school with her sisters, but only for a few days at a time, for she was subject from infancy to convulsive attacks of a hysterical nature. Because of this affliction she was at last allowed to omit school altogether and to throw off all restraint at home. The family rules were relaxed where she was concerned, and the chief problem in the Baker house was how to pacify Mary and avoid her nervous "fits." Even Mark Baker, heretofore invincible, was obliged to give way before the dominance of his infant daughter. His time-honoured observance of the Sabbath, which was a fixed institution at the Baker farm, was abandoned because Mary could not, after a long morning in church, sit still all day in the house with folded hands, listening to the reading of the Bible. Sundays became a day of torture not only to the hysterical child, but to all the family, for she invariably had one of her bad attacks, and the day ended in excitement and anxiety. These evidences of an abnormal condition of the nerves are im-