Page:The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy.djvu/469

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HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN SCIENCE
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usually walked about the fish-pond or paced the back veranda. She invariably took a nap before dinner, which she had in the middle of the day. Promptly at two o'clock she started upon her daily drive. Mr. Frye still acted as her secretary and companion, and Martha Morgan attended largely to the housekeeping. Later Mrs. Eddy sent for Miss Kate Shannon, a music-teacher in Montreal; for Mrs. Laura Sargent, who is still in attendance upon her, and for Mrs. Pamelia Leonard, who died at her home in Brooklyn, January 8, 1908, under the care of a physician.[1]

All the members of her household lived as if they were exactly as old and as much enfeebled as Mrs. Eddy. They rose early, retired early; never went out of the house except upon her commissions; never dined out, received visits, or went to Boston for a holiday. And why should they, when they believed that the most important things that had happened in the world for at least eighteen hundred years were daily going on at Pleasant View? They had built their hope upon the fundamental proposition that Mrs. Eddy was the inspired revelator of God; that, as the Journal expressed it, she had retired to Pleasant View to "commune always with God in the mount." To be in the house with Mrs. Eddy was the ultimate experience, and it left them nothing more to wish for. Mrs. Eddy filled their lives. Her breakfast, her nap, her correspondence, her visitors, her clothes, even, were matters of the greatest importance. Her faithful women especially delighted in dressing her hair,


  1. A Christian Scientist of Brooklyn who knew the circumstances of the death of Mrs. Leonard, has written to the author, since the appearance of this history in McClure's Magazine, to say, that although a physician was called to see Mrs. Leonard before her death, this was done in order to comply with the law requiring the signature of an attending physician to be attached to the death certificate upon which the burial permit is issued; and that Mrs. Leonard never lost faith in Christian Science.