Mrs. Eddy took the writer straight to her beloved "lookout"--a broad
piazza on the south side of the second story of the house, where she can
sit in her swinging chair, revelling in the lights and shades of spring
and summer greenness. Or, as just then, in the gorgeous October coloring
of the whole landscape that lies below, across the farm, which stretches
on through an intervale of beautiful meadows and pastures to the woods
that skirt the valley of the little truant river, as it wanders
eastward.
It pleased her to point out her own birthplace. Straight as the crow
flies, from her piazza, does it lie on the brow of Bow hill, and then
she paused and reminded the reporter that Congressman Baker from New
Hampshire, her cousin, was born and bred in that same neighborhood. The
photograph of Hon. Hoke Smith, another distinguished relative, adorned
the mantel.
Then my eye caught her family coat of arms and the diploma given her by
the Society of the Daughters of the Revolution.
The natural and lawful pride that comes with a tincture of blue and
brave blood, is perhaps one of her characteristics, as is many another
well born woman's. She had a long list of worthy ancestors in colonial
and revolutionary days, and the McNeils, and General Knox, figure
largely in her genealogy, as well as the hero who killed the ill-starred
Paugus.
This big, sunny room which Mrs. Eddy calls her den--or sometimes
"mother's room," when speaking of her many followers who consider her
their spiritual leader--has the air of hospitality that marks its
hostess herself. Mrs. Eddy has hung its walls with reproductions of some
of Europe's masterpieces, a few of which had been the gifts of her
loving pupils.
Looking down from the windows upon the tree-tops on the lower terrace,
the reporter exclaimed: "You have lived here only four years, and yet
from a barren waste of most unpromising ground has come forth all this
beauty!"
"Four years!" she ejaculated; "two and a half, only two and a half
years." Then, touching my sleeve and pointing, she continued: "Look at
those big elms! I had them brought here in warm weather, almost as big
as they are now, and not one died."
Mrs. Eddy talked earnestly of her friendships.... She told something
of her domestic arrangements, of how she had long wished to get away
from her busy career in Boston, and return to her native granite hills,
there to build a substantial home that should do honor to that precinct
of Concord.
She chose the stubbly, old farm on the road from Concord within one mile
of the "Eton of America," St. Paul's school. Once bought, the will of
the woman set at work, and to-day a strikingly well kept estate is the
first impression given to the visitor as he approaches Pleasant View.
She employs a number of men to keep the grounds and farm in perfect
order, and it was pleasing to learn that this rich woman is using her
money to promote the welfare of industrious workmen in whom she takes a
vital interest.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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