Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/373

The mother was the wife of a banker in Pierre, a woman of unusual force of character, who had been liberally educated in Germany. Her husband was a young man of energy and promise, and they were both extravagantly fond of their children. The wife took a course of lessons under a Christian Science practitioner in Des Moines, Ia., and returned to her home in Dakota a devout convert. One of her children, a little boy four years old, fell ill; she treated him without the aid of a physician, and he died. Some months later a second child, a baby eleven months old, began to pine. She believed that he was the victim of malicious animal magnetism, exercised by the members of the Methodist Church which she had left after becoming a Christian Scientist. She even believed that the Methodists were praying for the child's death, and fled to Des Moines with the baby, where he grew better; but when she returned home he became worse again. The father was then in New York on business, and the mother, on her own responsibility, undertook the case, telegraphing to E. J. Foster Eddy, Mrs. Eddy's adopted son, for absent treatment for the child. For ten days the misguided woman watched over her baby and treated him against malicious mesmerism, which she believed brought on the spasms and convulsions. She did not notify her husband that the baby was dangerously ill until she telegraphed word of its death, nine hours after death occurred; and for those nine hours after the child had ceased to breathe she treated and prayed over him, not permitting herself to shed a tear or to "entertain the thought of death," confidently expecting that his eyes would open again. This experience and the subsequent indignation of the townspeople seem to have